I don't think BASIC is good as teaching language, and it's certainly no good as a practical language, so who is this for? Hobbyists, maybe, but then why not use PICO8 or something similar?
I accept that 99% of the software I publish will have zero users, so even if it's no good for others it is still rewarding for its own sake.
As for why? Nostalgia. The first computer I owned was a ZX Spectrum that booted to BASIC. I loved it. I still love writing in BASIC, and I still play spectrum games under emulation at least once every few months.
My BASIC is like this one, fun to write, fun to tinker with, and at the end of the day it doesn't matter if others don't care/like it too
10 PRINT "John is awesome"
20 GOTO 10
..and now you've shown a child the power of complete control as well as the concept of infinity. I have not seen a remotely comparable demonstration for getting someone excited about programming in any other language.
- No good manuals! I lived in the sticks and had little access to the library. All I could do was flip through the GW-BASIC reference book. It sucked!
- Teaches bad habits. It took me years before I realized I was a bad programmer and was doing everything wrong!
- Not as powerful as a modern system. Modern stuff lets you easily sprites on the screen. That's 99.9% of what kids want to do! You can do a lot more, a lot more quickly with modern educational languages.
There are still big issues with distribution, but all things equal, it's way better to be a kid learning a modern language today than a kid learning BASIC in the 80s.
In modern languages, python is an excellent beginner’s language.
I learned how to do loops and logic in Basic. C & C++'s syntax was just confusing to me when I was younger. A few days with Basic was all that I needed for the light bulb to go off in my head and work in C++.
I think learning a more popular language (like python) would have been more helpful, but as a teaching tool, VB was great and helped me quickly jump into those other languages.