The last thing I did in a BASIC dialect was VB.NET circa 2007-8 and was a service in a .NET webapp backend. At the time I was a EE with limited professional programming experience outside of small personal utilities. Like a lot of people I had first encountered BASIC with the Apple II in a school computer lab around 1995 and built some small text adventure games with it.

I echo the sentiment of proxybop; the ability to type things and see something happen is a powerful motivator in learning to code. As a lot of commenters point out, Python seems to have largely replaced BASIC as the "beginner" language to help teach folks. The REPL reinforces this, imo.