We have similar experience with VB6, though I was the opposite. Instead of reading a book about BASIC, I was reading a book about VB.NET.
My first interaction with Visual Basic was through VBA in MS Word. The first time I opened it, I know that it was a place to code, but I don't know what kind of code I have to type. I don't know any programming language at that time.
And then sometimes later, I found a VB.NET book at a bookstore. I was overjoyed at that time, and immediately tried it on VBA to be dejected because the code didn't run at all. I still remember how I several times, until I swear that if the last trial I do also didn't run, I will give up. Fortunately, it does run!!!
Turns out, I didn't know that the VBA on MS Word in my computer is based on VB 6 while my book is about VB.NET. The code is a little different, and that's why my code didn't run.
After that, I bought every book I can find about VB 6. I also somehow stumble upon a VB 6 IDE installation on my relatives CD stash, and installed it on my computer.
And till today, I still think that VB 6 GUI Builder is the best I have ever tried.
When .NET finally came out and I started learning about it (I had signed up for a course at this point) I remember it feeling much more complicated - I didn't understand why I needed objects and I also recall not understanding access modifiers like protected / private - who am I protecting my code from? The book I got for the course was like an encyclopedia. I failed the microsoft certification exam, not surprisingly. I was just finishing middle school and starting high school so it didn't really matter.
I think there's probably some lesson in there about microsoft misunderstanding the strength of VB as a RAD tool for mom and pop shops and non-software firms who have a single tinkerer, rather than an Enterprise Language. It died a slow death in favor of C# at that point. Embrace, extend, extinguish, perhaps.
VB6 is arguably the most popular and influential version of Basic it only makes sense to keep backwards compatibility with it. Why would anyone not want that from their Visual Basic clone?
because that's immensely backwards! what if vb3-6 had the same syntax as msbasic and same ascii text based UIs? it wouldn't have been as popular.
these tools could be the modern vb6, having modern UX paradigms such as responsive design etc... yet it is just producing something one would use only for nostalgia or explicitly support for a niche market still needing actual vb6... which i didn't know existed till now.
There's nothing stopping anyone from building responsive UI components in this or even in Visual Basic itself. I thought were were talking about VB6, the programming language, not the UI toolkit. They are closely related but not necessarily the same thing.
Given that there are already other, more modern, languages and frameworks that do you want you describe I don't think there is a market for that kind of modern Basic. That's why nobody has done it.
IMO, Pragtical (and Lite XL) is closer to Atom ideologically where almost everything is a plugin. But compared to Atom, they ship the bare minimum of plugin in their release and let user install the rest as they need. Pragtical is better in this regards than Lite XL where they ship better UI improvement and default plugin, for example the setting page must be installed as a plugin in Lite XL but already shipped as part of Pragtical release.
I agree with you that they should add some plugin as part of their core app to increase user's experience out of the box though.
Lite XL (which is a project Pragtical forked on) is my first experience writing a plugin for code editor and coding in Lua, and I am surprised on how easy is it. I don't know about other editors, but in Lite XL and Pragtical I can extend or overwrite almost anything the core plugin is doing. I can even start writing the plugin in my user module file (init.lua), and see the change on the fly.
This is inspired by Emacs which works the same way. It, in turn, takes inspiration from how Lisp systems have worked since time immemorial. You're meant to open a REPL directly into the running system as a way to evolve it.
Talking about text/code editor journey, currently I am using Pragtical, a fork of Lite XL. I have always wanted a GUI editor that is lightweight but easy enough to extend with plugin. And Pragtical and Lite XL almost checks all the box for me. There is still some missing features like code folding that has not been implemented, but it is not a killer feature for me.
I actually quite enjoy fiddling with it and I have been writing several plugins for Lite XL and Pragtical even though I have no experience on Lua before.
Lite XL's Matrix rooms (which is bridged with their Discord) is quite active and their member usually responds to any question asked.
I agree that Kate is a good code editor. I have tried more than a year ago when I still use KDE Plasma (now switched to Gnome). Honestly, I am happy that there is at least one GUI Code Editor from a big community that actually on par with some popular code editor (VS Code, Sublime, etc). Because I see that most code editors made by the Linux community are always lacking in features when compared to other popular code editors.
However, there are some things that make me not use Kate as my daily editor. One of them is the file browser feature which I find more complicated than its alternatives in Sublime Text or VSCode for example. In addition, the small number of plugins for Kate is also one of the reasons I do not use it.
My first interaction with Visual Basic was through VBA in MS Word. The first time I opened it, I know that it was a place to code, but I don't know what kind of code I have to type. I don't know any programming language at that time.
And then sometimes later, I found a VB.NET book at a bookstore. I was overjoyed at that time, and immediately tried it on VBA to be dejected because the code didn't run at all. I still remember how I several times, until I swear that if the last trial I do also didn't run, I will give up. Fortunately, it does run!!!
Turns out, I didn't know that the VBA on MS Word in my computer is based on VB 6 while my book is about VB.NET. The code is a little different, and that's why my code didn't run.
After that, I bought every book I can find about VB 6. I also somehow stumble upon a VB 6 IDE installation on my relatives CD stash, and installed it on my computer.
And till today, I still think that VB 6 GUI Builder is the best I have ever tried.