The problem is deeply technical people will put for the effort to learn deeper languages so that leaves a majority of the candidates as being people who want to learn programming because they want to scratch an itch. That being said, BASIC is usually not the language or platform they want to scratch that itch on, more and more the web and mobile are where they want to deliver to. That being said, JavaScript becomes the better investment of time, due to the fact that it directly parallels their goals in learning programming in the first place.

More and more I am starting to think Objective-C and IOS may be a contender, while, Objective-C is technically more difficultly to get started in, the technology stack is a lot simpler, to be effective on the web, one needs to know HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then really and truly they need to know a back end language or Node.js to deliver a back end. Whereas Objective-C and IOS is a visual editor and code. The feedback loop is faster for IOS development than JavaScript development and I believe the feedback loop is very important to a certain population of would be developers. I have never tried to teach a non-programmer Objective-C and IOS dev so the above statement is loaded with assumptions. Please read it as such, but I am leaning towards trying it next time someone approaches me and wants to learn.