It's hard to overstate how important BASIC was to the adoption of personal computing - it provided a straightforward way to program an entire generation of home computers and bootstrapped countless careers.
Visual coding is my nemesis. I just disagree with it in principle. It makes even the simplest things complicated and virtually impossible to debug.
BASIC was the first computer language I learned. It’s so basic I just taught it to myself from the help section when I was 12, without any exceptional ability on my part.
At bedtime we're a "you don't have to sleep, but you have to be quiet" household so if he had it in his room it might see some use.
You need some visual thing for the appeal.
Instead aiming for that Frankenstein moment of excitement ‘holy shit this thing is kinda alive!’ Is where you want to get to.
I introduced a friend’s kid to basic the other day. She’s about 9 and was already getting the idea of an input, making some decisions and writing an output. Even with that just being text she was excited, and was already having her own ideas what to do next.
I ended up working in computer graphics :-)
I agree with your sentiment re: scratch though. With scratch I struggle to pull kids away from the drawing and asset selection tools. I’d like scratch without this.
Because there is no such thing as a syntax error in scratch. 10 year olds are not great at typing, spelling, or paying attention to the small details.
Scratch rules out a whole class of bugs and allows the kids to jump right into solving the interesting problems.
As a clueless, overly ambitious 12 year old I was a massive annoyance for the skilled users on their forums, I remember getting ranted at for wasting people's time with stupid questions, writing awful code, not understanding licenses etc, but it was a pretty good entry point until I managed to get my hands on books for more modern languages.
I even used BASIC professionally for a while in the 1990s.