On Sun, 9 Feb 2020 15:38:10 -0800 (PST), wrote:

It contains no real/decent programming language, unlike ms-dos that did contain QBASIC, and the C64 which also contained BASIC.

Something is better than nothing.

Microsoft Visual Studio is free. Not included within Windows itself, but
still easy to get.
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/

Also, everyone who has Microsoft Office already has a Visual Basic (VBA)
development environment, so that could be another option. Each of the MS
Office applications has the VBA IDE built in.