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.