RapidQ

Rapid-Q is a cross platform Basic free programming language, is available for Windows 95/98/NT/2000, Linux/i386, Solaris/Sparc, and HP-UX. It generates stand alone EXE of about 300Kb. Due to the fact that it's free RapidQ has gained great success and althought the project has been abandoned by its creator William Yu in August 2000 when it has been hired by RealBasic Inc.

Thousands of programmers still continue to develope with it and are still implementing new functions (sometimes re-engineering its libraries!). It has a simple IDE to help beginners creating their applications. Excellent. There are some interesting third-party IDEs/RADs for Rapid-Q: RapidQ++IDE (the site is in italian only), Basic-IDE (once called Koolbasic) New RapidQ IDE (unfortunately it has been abandoned as you may read in the FAQs section), RapidQ Creator and RQWork.

Before RapidQ vanishes from the Net here you can download a package containing the original version, some usefull patches and new Includes. The official site is gone, but you may find lot of resources on this site.