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.
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.