[kjdal2001]

I absolutely agree. My first experience was with QuickBASIC in the late 90s. I don't remember how I got my hands on it, but it was remarkably easy to pick up for a 10 year old with no programming experience and no one else in the house to answer questions. It was clearly designed with a quick feedback loop and small barriers to entry in mind.

[dragonbonheur]

And you remember the documentation that came with that? Absolutely amazing for the time. Although syntax highlighting had not become prevalent yet, the absolute bliss of just pressing F1 and seeing all the documentation you needed was and still is unmatched. Python integration with its various IDEs still doesn't compare to what an obscure dialect like QB64 offers today.

[kjdal2001]

Yeah, it was fantastic. After programming in QuickBASIC ~1998-99, I didn't really do any programming for about 8 years. When I got back into it (in college) I was frustrated by how difficult it seems to get off the ground. The world of c++, python, command line, vim, shared libraries, package repositories, etc..., is very powerful, but it takes a lot of knowledge to get to the point of creating something of value.

At my job, we have been getting non-programmers (at least people who aren't 100% programmers) to learn some python. It has been going fairly well, but there is still a lot of ancillary knowledge, often about the programming environment, that they don't have which means a programmer needs to get involved. As much as I dislike Excel, it does a great job of letting people think about their business logic without getting side tracked dealing with dependencies, libraries, whatever. I feel like BASIC had similar strengths, but was code with all of the advantages that brings. More modern languages like python could learn something from it.

[theseatoms]

This is identical to my experience teaching non-programmers to write Python. We end up reverting to Excel so often.

[dragonbonheur]

You should both teach them FreeBASIC. After they've written their first Objects as Extended Types they will have no trouble at all moving on to C++ if they want to. They will have little trouble finding out how to create GUIs using GTK or how to compile for DOS, Windows and Linux and they won't lose time trying to figure out how to distribute their programs or wondering if the Python runtime is installed on their client's machines or not.