Are you more interested in actually writing to PC VGA registers, or just the idea of writing a pixel-by-pixel renderer? There are bindings for SDL and SFML in a lot of languages, and the web technology option mentioned by the sibling comment.

If you like the idea of "DOS-based VGA programming" (taken literally), you could also find a DOS compiler or assembler and run it in DosBox. All of IBM's hardware-level documentation can still be found online: http://www.mcamafia.de/pdf/pdfref.htm