What is that new animal ? Well, Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, like Visual Basic™ (but it is NOT a clone !). Read the introduction for more information.
With Gambas, you can quickly design your program GUI, access MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite databases, pilot KDE applications with DCOP, translate your program into many languages, create network applications easily, make 3D OpenGL applications, and so on...