Why clone QBASIC, an old, outdated, discontinued, and more-or-less useless language? Two reasons, one you might care about, and one I care about:
1: Despite QBASIC being discontinued, many schools still use it as a tool to introduce students to programming. And DOS has nearly been eradicated from Windows (completely in the x64 versions), rendering it impossible to use QBASIC in newer computers. pykeBASIC will make it possible to migrate to newer (or different) operating systems, without the need to discard their QBASIC-related material
2: I'm a bit rusty from my own high school programming courses, and I wanted to jump right in and learn Python, the hard way. I figured that this would be a good way to understand Python, as well as getting an idea of how programming languages work.
And as far as the name goes: Python + QBASIC -> pyqbasic -> pykebasic