I know BASIC is kind of a “bad” language, but there’s something so delightful about it. If we’re plugging TinyBASIC projects that others might find interesting, I made an MMO TinyBASIC REPL the other day: http://10klob.com/
People too often complain about original BASIC, and forget most dialects moved away from line numbers and spaghetti GOTOs during the 16 bit days, with widepsread of compilers and structured constructs.
I am really glad that I only got to learn C, after getting through Turbo Basic, Quick Basic, Turbo Pascal[0], doing exactly the same kind of stuff urban myths say it was only possible after C came to be.
[0] - On 16 bit systems, I started coding on an 8bit Timex 2068.
BASIC is an amazing language that computing novices (including humanities majors) could learn in an afternoon, that could be efficiently compiled or compactly interpreted, that was small enough to support dozens of interactive users on a mainframe or minicomputer, or to fit into a tiny 8-bit microcomputer – and yet was largely equivalent to FORTRAN in terms of its expressive power.
I think the closest modern equivalents might be Python (for easy onramp and scalability from microcontrollers to supercomputers) and JavaScript (for pure ubiquity in every device with a web browser.)
I wonder if there is a modern-ish (?) environment that can match Visual BASIC in terms of easy GUI app programming. Perhaps Python or Tcl with Tk (Qt seems harder) or maybe Delphi, or perhaps a modern Smalltalk.
Advanced BASICs are too big for that, and in less advanced ones you get to POKE the hardware to do certain things.
Which means you get to learn a bunch of hardware and machine code. That's not all bad though!
Delphi, and naturally Visual Basic for .NET with Windows Forms, not forgeting about C#, however it is getting a bit too much featurities lately, and most likely not what the BASIC target audience would like.
Let’s make a Teeny Tiny compiler https://austinhenley.com/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html