@clacke Oh, yes. But in a machine with 4K of RAM (late 1970s), they likely were doing well just to get a BASIC interpreter running well enough to attract people to become customers and users.

The Commodore 64 and 128 used BASIC because they had already done most of the work in creating the PET and the VIC-20. And because the 4K-16K versions of the very popular Apple II and TRS-80 had also used BASIC. Atari also chose BASIC for the second reason.

I doubt that home computers would have been as popular if Forth or LISP had been the default languages. OTOH, we might have retained more control of our devices.