A year ago I picked up the BASIC dialect PureBasic. Pleasant surprise actually, the syntax of the PureBasic dialect is a bit archaic, but if you accept that it is much easier and faster to get anything done compared to C (and C++). Personally I find low level topics easier to grok in PureBasic than in C even though they mirror the same concepts. PureBasic has Unicode strings built in.

It is a bit shame that BASIC has such a bad reputation, there are many BASIC dialects that does the job well still today.

https://www.purebasic.com/documentation/reference/ug_string....