I teach high school CS and have eventually come to the same insight, and found that novice programmers do indeed understand primitive BASIC much more easily tha

I teach high school CS and have eventually come to the same insight, and found that novice programmers do indeed understand primitive BASIC much more easily than Python. Python seems simple to us, but there is so much abstraction even in its base-level syntax. I am gradually redeveloping my course materials to use BASIC (via replit.com) in the early stages.