I hate to be superficial, but languages without braces just feel weird to me. I can use them and have even for a paycheck, but... no thanks. Even Lua, one of my favorite languages (if not #1), always feels at least slightly weird when I use it because of do/end.

Rather, QB was the pico8 of the 1990s. Convenient, self-contained, mysterious, quasi-powerful, in-app help menu for the entire language and API, and a few built-in demo games.

I remember VB-DOS, and fondly too. It was magical. I think I used it even before VB3.

FreeBASIC is a free/open source BASIC compiler for Windows DOS and Linux

For the longest time, I used them just in case it would otherwise cause a bug. But TypeScript fully takes this into account and checks for all these scenarios.