In early 2000 I made some small, commercial, games using BlitzBasic and Blitzmax. Coming from 7+ years programming in C/C++ it was a breeze to work with.
Mark Sibly, the creator BlitzBasic, Blitzmax and Monkey, really has a talent to make beautiful simple languages.
What I took from those years is that the best tools are those that let you hit the ground running.
Anyway, I want to thank you for the Imatix webserver (blast of the past), Libero and the first few chapters of Scalable-C and all the other snippets of knowledge and wisdom which I'm happy to carry around on my head. Good stuff.
It's a very fun language to begin with. Which is not unimportant if you want to keep being motivated after three decades being a programmer. Peter Norvig described 7 features which made Lisp different. Perl shares 6 of them. Important features like first-class functions, dynamic access to the symbol table, and automatic storage management. (source "High Order Perl" by MJ Dominus).