Approachable? I believe it's a solid "yes". Well, QBASIC was one of my 1st exposure to programming in high school, almost 2 decades ago. Internet access was kin

Approachable? I believe it's a solid "yes". Well, QBASIC was one of my 1st exposure to programming in high school, almost 2 decades ago. Internet access was kinda limited at that time, and I could understand the basic concepts (data types, loop, condition etc) in a few weeks by studying a book. Maybe I'm biased. Productive? Not really sure about this. But obviously Python has a nice standard library and package manager which help you install 3rd party libs easily. Not idea which modern BASIC environment which provides that. If you want to handle various networking, GUI, database etc stuffs then probably Python is easier.