"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, Burroughs Research Fellow, 1975
I keep this quote on the wall outside my cubicle, because I program exclusively in BASIC unless I'm writing code for embedded systems, in which case, straight C. But I'm also not a professional programmer. Rather, I use programming to solve short term problems for myself and for people in my immediate vicinity. If one of my algorithms ends up in a product, it gets translated into a modern C variant by one of our programmers.
I suggested BASIC to a student a few days ago, and now realize it's a bad idea, literally because it's too easy, and you get into the habit of doing things the easy way rather than the way that's the currently accepted practice. Folks of my generation who got good at procedural programming had a devil of a time learning OOP.
Now a point about the math. Don't consider it to be merely a hurdle to overcome. Hopefully you're majoring in CS because you actually like math. Also, instead of learning a language per se, you could also try something fun like finding out what it takes to write a simple program for your cell phone. In the process you will learn a lot of the basics.
