So did the Blitz BASIC family. The thing that always impressed and astonished me about BlitzMax was just how many games seemed to actually get _finished_ with it. Lots of them even looked very polished. It was really cool to see at the time (around 2006ish I think is when I was following it, though not exactly sure).
That was the first programming language I ever learned - lots of fun memories spent in Blitz3D and BlitzMax trying to make "the next Skyrim" with high school friends.
The newest member of that family is Monkey 2 [0], not to be confused with Thorsten Ball's Monkey [1].