BASIC is an ill-defined term, but if you mean the most modern versions of BASIC (as I seriously hope you don't mean 8-bit era BASIC), they aren't significantly different from Javascript circa 2005 in terms of quirkiness and silliness (and that's assuming you've got one with some sort of closure support, which I don't recall if one ever existed; without that BASIC is a clear loser behind Javascript-2005), and Javascript is certainly moving to exceed any BASIC I know about lately.

Javascript does have a lot of flaws, but unlike BASIC which is pretty much dead, the main structure of Javascript is alive and well, as dynamic scripting languages are still very much a going concern.

> BASIC which is pretty much dead

Tell that to the enterprise employees writing Office macros or doing VB.NET applications.