Dijkstra notwithstanding, BASIC has the same strengths and weaknesses as, later, PHP would for the web, and I think that Javascript might have these days (and in the scientific programming world, Python).

That is, it's very easy for the novice to get something working that gives them the results they want.  Maintainability and efficiency are simply not on their radar for the scope of problem they're trying to solve.  I'm not even sure how much of this you can lay at the feet of teachers: I would argue that we see a huge efflorescence of essentially self-taught programming cobbled together from (in the old days) the system manuals and programs in magazines, and (these days) Googling that takes you to Stack Overflow and various tutorials, of wildly varying quality.

Maybe we should take the "personal" in "personal computing" seriously.  That said, now that your personal project is probably exposed to the world via the Web, maybe that's not a good idea if you have any data behind that project whose integrity or privacy you care about.

Disclaimer: my formative experiences were MS BASIC on 6502-based micros, and were fundamentally self-taught.

Adam