= new reply since forum marked as read
Java, C, C++, C#, just about any language I can think of have very powerful free compilers out there. In fact the only reason to ever spend a penny on a compiler is when you start to get really serious and need the powerful tools that are integrated into the professional IDE/Compiler tools. Just about every language out there has powerful and free compilers available.
And I wouldn't recommend BASIC anymore as it's really outdated and really only sets you down the wrong path at this point. There are many other languages like Javascript, Python, Java and C# that are much better alternatives. Don't mean to sound pushy 
As far as other languages, I was deliberate in my choices, "obsolete" be damned.
I was considering the required learning curve of an interested but as of yet uncommitted person of indeterminate resources getting started without assistance "in-person." Consider, putting yourself in the position of someone who knows very little
about programming and how many concepts you have to get through to write Hello World:
10 print "Hello World"
vs
class myfirstjavaprog
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println("Hello World!"
}
}
or
#include<stdio.h>
main()
{
printf("Hello World"
}
I wanted this person, by themself, to create their first program within an hour (including setup of the environment). You will never LEARN to love programming if it takes three days to understand what a library is or why you need the little curley brackets or why that g*dd*mned semicolon has to be on each line. Don't get me started on having to read what a class is and why I have to describe its scope as "public."
I hardly am pushing Basic on its technical merits. The poster downthread who mentioned Python is closer but seriously, if I wanted to be precise that in my indentation I would go back to Fortran and reap the benefits of number crunching.
For this person, my PLAN was to suggest BASIC for the first taste, and if it was good then go PYTHON from there.
to all of you on this one. Now let's start a real flame war. vi or emacs?And for getting your first few programs up and running and having some fun BASIC is still ok. Once you can write a for loop or two though and understand some basics of structure I'd drop it. I'm really thinking of this from the point of view of a serious hobby or more, which who knows if the OP is interested in it to that degree
As for using CLI that's nice but if you were to work in any large development team on any project out there they'd insist you use whatever flavour of the day IDE they are using internally. The powerful debug tools, seamless integration with version management tools, code completion, and much much more really are HUGE time savers when working in large programming projects as a team. Here you are talking about compiling and linking thousands of different source files from different people across different departments, and keeping it all synchronized and up to date. You would not want to do this kind of stuff without an IDE.
So I am clueless about what's available for the other, lesser , operating systems.
I've seen their "training" in action 
I get a little prickly when people lump HTML and CSS in with programming though. Just a pet peeve
Unless someone really wants to dive into the deep end of the programming pool right away programming on these limited platforms with a language like C is a daunting challenge. I fully agree you don't REALLY know what programming is all about, what is going on at a deeper level until you start to work at the lower level, in C and other similar languages. But that really does entail learning a LOT. If you really want to go down this path I agree 100% nothing could be more enlightening. But unless you are willing to learn about memory allocation and deallocation, pointers and pointer arithmetic, memory addressing, and other minutia, I don't recommend it.
Python is a good idea though
