> I’m pretty disenchanted by the choice of languages. None of them embody the human-first optimism of early BASICs.

Nothing yet exists that has the same properties: simplicity and automatic availability. JS wins on availability as it is present on almost every general purpose device via a web browser, but the syntax is not as human friendly as

10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10

or better, lets tweak the language a bit and get rid of the line numbers:

This is the start
Print "Hello"
Goto the start

Though as much as we love to hate them, I'd say spreadsheets come closest to That What Was because the people who use them are automatically there for work or to do some basic calcs for themselves, and the “programming” side of it is just there for them to discover as they need more complexity, they don't need to decide “I want to program”, they have a problem, they look up a solution, find one online, and modify it for their own needs, much like me in the 80s typing in a 10-line graphics demo or basic game and learning more by tweaking it. To a lesser extent things like minecraft count too.

> I don’t have a strong proposition for a specific language.

> People try to tell me that dream is dead. God I hope not,

There is no such language for current times, so the dream of reproducing the feeling BBC BASIC¹ in the days of yore because not only has the tech mover on but so have people's expectations. No one is going to be satisfied with those simple introductions as we were back then, so the barrier for entry is higher - the language and wider environment need to provide much more and make all that feel like the heady days of drawing random coloured dots in graphics mode 2 while, hiding all the complexity long enough to not put people off, while not limiting itself by hiding that complexity (making the complex more so, or even impossible) so that people give up when they discover they need to move to something else to get beyond a certain point⁴. And it needs to somehow compete with the rest of the world, gone are the days that you are sat in front of a disconnected computer with not much else to do but experiment and learn - it can't wait to be discovered it needs to drag people away from consuming and actively attract them to creating⁴. And we aren't just dealing with a bunch of nerds/geeks who speak at least a little English, anything like this these days needs to be embarrassingly easy to perfectly internationalise⁵, without breaking anything⁴. And it then has to get commonly accepted to become popular and therefore survive³. If you create a language/environment that manages all that⁴, then why not finish off your morning with breakfast at MILLYWAYS?!

[1] The best 8-bit basic, bar non. No silly-short naming limits, proper procedures and functions² rather than just GOTO & GOSUB, a built-in multi-pass assembler for if you got really adventurous, ...

[2] Well, there were significant limits compared to what we have now, but understandably so in such small power & memory.

[3] Not unlike how gods and belief work in Pratchett's Discworld.

[4] This is, of course, impossible.

[5] ref: “reflected and it’s very English syntax”, and it isn't nearly as simple as just swapping keywords out for local ones either.

> BASIC was designed for normal humans to actually get work done,

I hate to break it to you but we were, at best, a subset of normal humans, in the eyes of the rest of the humans!

> Every time a user does a repetitive task that should have been a loop they created themself,

That is rather too dogmatic. I'm a dev-cum-DBA with decades of inexperience behind me, and I do many repetitive things that I've not yet automated. If you automate everything you do more than twice you end up automating things that you'll never use again after next week, and never actually do much beyond making and testing automations.

> that dream is dead

Going back to that: the general dream is dead IMO. We need to stop hoping to find the One True Path to lead people along. The dream can still exist in smaller parts though, if we accept multiple very different paths without disparaging any particular ones of them: people starting by automating Minecraft stuff, people starting by trying to make DayJob easier in Excel, people in learning settings using interative notebooks to explore in more detail, people who want to make Alexa tell a fart gag at an inappropriate time to embarrass gran, people adding interaction to a simple web page, ... No one language or environment can do all, or even a fraction of, the everythings that might work for some people.

I, like many others, unfortunately have no idea what to do about it, beyond pontificating as above and hoping that someone else comes up with some bright new ideas (or resurrects some forgotten old ones that were not fully realised/appreciated in their original frame).