GAMBAS is a free development environment and a full powerful object-oriented language and development platform based on a Basic interpreter with optional just-in-time compilation, as easy as Visual Basic™ was.

Gambas is the programming language I used to create Story Lathe. It's a great tool and I love it!
I've not found anything that it can't do and I've watched it grow from strength to strength over the last 10 years when I discovered it, while looking for a programming language I could use on Linux.

Created by Benoît Minisini in France along with a strong user community.
There are some great user forums in various languages. English, French, Spanish, German, Italian

The main Gambas web site has all the information you might need if you would like to give it a try.

Currently, Gambas is not available for Windows or Apple. So only the main Linux distros.