The next time a thread about "what should I give a kid today instead of BASIC" rolls around, a Forth with Starting Forth and Thinking Forth is a probable answer.
Forth gives an even more direct experience than the microcomputer BASICs did: you wrote a word, it was a number so it went on a stack, then you wrote a different word, and it popped the number from the stack. You allocated memory with ALLOT. Now when you run HERE(the address of the bump allocator), you see that it moved up by the amount that you passed to ALLOT. You can use SEE to explore word definitions and get a sense of how much of the language is implemented in itself. You can explore the double number arithmetic to learn fixed point maths.
It just poses a certain clarity and lack of restriction that is only limited by how much the programmer can reason through their abstractions. Thinking Forth helps with that, in that it shows that you can often solve things in a simpler way than you thought.
