Maybe. Having been a 10-year old when both of these languages were available, my main goals were to make things that looked cool to share with friends and family. My dad set me up with a BASIC256 environment around the time it was released, and I liked it because it gave immediate feedback and had a built-in graphics interface.
JavaScript: Cool language, but I was not excited about all of my work happening in a web browser. I wanted to make imperative programs, but most JavaScript tutorials were focused on enabling little DOM manipulations that were not very exciting to me. Plus, the heavy focus on Async programming went over my head. If NodeJS was around when I was first dabbling with JavaScript I probably would have stuck around with it more.
Python: Probably the best thing to introduce to a kid these days, but I used a shared family Windows computer with restricted users and setting up environments and package managers was always a pain.
I ended up spending a lot of time with Scratch, mostly for the collaborative online community.
Overall my trajectory was BASIC256->Scratch->C++->Python/Java/everything else
Mine (starting in late 1980s) was GW-BASIC -> Visual Basic (esp with Access) -> Ruby -> PHP/WordPress -> JavaScript -> everything else. It worked then because it was hard to find education material, and the alternatives (C, Lisp) were so damned hard.
I think the trade-off is that Python has an immense ecosystem - libraries (e.g. PyGame Zero), education material, people. Plus you can point to real-world examples of people building stuff with Python - you can make actual money with it. I'd be worried that teaching BASIC puts them in a niche - one where they make progress more quickly, but struggle to get out of.
> I'd be worried that teaching BASIC puts them in a niche - one where they make progress more quickly, but struggle to get out of.
I'd think that learning BASIC then Python (or Ruby, PHP, JS, whatever) would still be a lot easier (at least for a 10 year old kid) than starting with one of the latter languages directly, due to the incidental complexity that all of those have. Most pro developers will be able to work with more than one language anyway.
JavaScript: Cool language, but I was not excited about all of my work happening in a web browser. I wanted to make imperative programs, but most JavaScript tutorials were focused on enabling little DOM manipulations that were not very exciting to me. Plus, the heavy focus on Async programming went over my head. If NodeJS was around when I was first dabbling with JavaScript I probably would have stuck around with it more.
Python: Probably the best thing to introduce to a kid these days, but I used a shared family Windows computer with restricted users and setting up environments and package managers was always a pain.
I ended up spending a lot of time with Scratch, mostly for the collaborative online community.
Overall my trajectory was BASIC256->Scratch->C++->Python/Java/everything else