Have a look at Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/), an open source clone of what Delphi used to be. Active development, can compile to single executables for Windows, Linux and Mac OS. And the language is way more powerful than Basic.
What it did differently to Pascal was that it allowed for lazy / inferred typing along with some transparent type conversation in places where the intention was obvious. However in VB once a variable is defined a type (either when defined or when assigned a value - depending on how the variable was defined) you couldn’t change it. Eg you cannot overwrite an integer with a string
Weirdly, despite being branded a toy language, this meant VB actually had one of the more sophisticated type systems out of the languages of that era because you had the laziness of languages like JS and PHP but without having the === et al kludge that some loosely typed languages need.
Perl is another language that frequently gets mocked but it’s eq vs == solution for differentiating between strings and numeric types is genius and again solves the whole type comparison problem that JavaScript has.
I loved “Option Explicit”. To the extent that it was almost always the first line I’d write for any new project, module and class.