@clacke I think there are modern dialects of BASIC that fix most of the yucky parts. From what I hear, RealBasic / Xojo [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xojo and https://www.xojo.com/ ] and PureBasic [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PureBasic and https://www.purebasic.com/ ] are in that list.
(I have not tried out anything beyond VisualBasic 5&6, XBasic [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBasic and http://www.xbasic.org/ ], and a long-dead VB clone called Phoenix Basic [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Object_Basic and http://www.janus-software.com/phoenix_features.html ], and probably none of them within the past decade or two. )