@amoroso And I think that derision of BASIC as a "toy" language by smug 6502 or z80 ASM programmers caused some smugness to rub off against REPLs as a concept for a decade or so.
It's important to remember that BASIC was used in some heavy-duty production workloads! The lighting system for A Chorus Line in the mid-70s was all managed by a PDP-8 running BASIC, and it was at the time the most complex lighting plan of any stage show in history.
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1060.91