Eric: Thanks for asking. I used BASIC for accessing ASCII files and analyzing data we would pull from long streams of operant data from psychology experiments (basically long streams of numbers up to about 250,000 per file). No commercially available programs were available because of the niche work being done at a university lab. Frankly, once the 2000s rolled around, people kept telling me to get rid of BASIC and move on to something else. BASIC works so why should I move on? Mathematica, however, seems to do some wonderful things that "could" make some of my programming outputs (graphing) easier to achieve. The problem is, I don't know anyone who uses it and all the discussions of the software seem to be people doing work very unlike myself.

Interesting that your application is in the area of psychology! A long time ago, I helped my wife (who is not a programmer) with a lot of data wrangling and visualization for a project related to social network analysis in high schools. The raw data was in paper forms that students filled out, which was then entered into a structured text file (CSV, if I remember correctly). We use Mathematica to process this data: removing a lot of errors from manual entries and cleaning things up. Next we used the statistical functionality to do a basic overall analysis. Then we used the visualization function to create various plots (community graph plots, etc.)

If you're willing to put in the time to learn this great Mathematica tool (e.g. read the Elementary Introduction: https://www.wolfram.com/language/elementary-introduction/2nd-ed/) then I think you will enjoy programming in Mathematica (Wolfram Language) a lot more than programming in BASIC.

Maybe you could provide an example of the kind of computation you want to do. Then we could examine the pros and cons of using Mathematica in that context.