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wnoise comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong
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"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." --Edsger W Dijkstra.
More modern versions aren't that bad, and it's not quite fair to tar them with the same brush, but I still wouldn't recommend learning any of them for their own sake. If there is a need (like modifying an existing codebase), then by all means do.
Dijkstra's quote is amusing, but out of date. The only modern version anyone uses is VB.NET, which isn't actually a bad language at all. On the other hand, it also lacks much of the "easy to pick up and experiment with" aspect that the old BASICs had; in that regard, something like Ruby or Python makes more sense for a beginner.