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I started programming in Commodore 64 Basic when I was in elementary school. But I think you are having a "Get off my lawn!" moment.
Try Cygwin. You'll get a Unix shell environment that blows away Basic as a learning tool, is free, and installs as easily as any other Windows app.
You can get as "close to the metal" or as abstract as you like. If you want to write your own algorithm to sort text in ASCII-ascending order, like I did in Basic back in '84, there is nothing to prevent you from doing that in a bash script. But isn't it much nicer just to type "sort" and save your mental expenditure for less tedious programming exercises?
That's what I remember most about Basic. God, was it tedious. Beginning each line with a new number. Hoping you left enough of an interval between lines so you wouldn't have to renumber them later when you inserted additional code. Gosub 23000. What the hell did that mean? Scroll down to line 23000 and find out. Spaghetti code isn't a bug, it's the primary feature of the Basic programming language. A lot of tedium that just didn't add that much to my understanding of programming.
