Many a programmer my age got interested in it as teenagers from BASIC. If understand it correctly, Gates deserves the most credit for inventing BASIC, but Allen deserves a lot of credit for promoting it.
Allen was an ASSEMBLY Language programmer who did most of the grunt work while Gates was on the phone most of the time promoting things. Both did BASIC too.
Gates didn’t invent BASIC, what he did do is recognize the value of DOS, which he also didn’t create but bought it from another (Tim Paterson?) for around $60,000 - knowing that it was exactly what IBM wanted.
Without that there would never be the Microsoft we know today.
That said, I’ve heard many times about Paul being a genius, RIP.