I think it is a real pity that Basic is not taken seriously by more developers. I agree that in its early days it was, well, "basic", but it evolved into a very powerful development platform in the guise of Visual Basic. Productivity was far higher than with Visual C++, and for what few low level functions it could not support you could always create a DLL using C/C++ and pull that in from VB.

On Linux we still have Gambas, which is easily the fastest way to create a Linux GUI application. It is very similar to VB, and its flavour of Basic takes the language to a level beyond even VB. For projects where I have complete freedom of choice I use nothing else. It runs faster than python and, for GUI apps, it's far simpler and more productive.