Ooh, I love this. Somehow despite the intervening years I have found every environment I try to set up for my kids lacking compared to my early days with QuickBASIC. The combination of integrated help, a nice REPL and a simple interactive debugger is great to learn to reason about code. I’ve been quite impressed with GAMBAS, which is probably the best combination of simplicity and integration that I’ve found, not requiring constant googling or a separate tutorial, but it’s great to see something built around a language that could stick with them for years.
The marvelous thing about QBASIC was that you could just dive right in with PSET, LINE, CIRCLE etc, which capture the imagination in a way that "Hello World" doesn't. The only modern environment I know of that makes it that easy is Processing.
Writing graphical games, fractal viewers, cellular automata etc in QBASIC was how I got into programming AND recreational mathematics.