I loved Blitz Basic. It was great how it gave you access to the whole Amiga. You could use the built-in commands, write inline assembly, and easily use operating system functions/structures. Modern "game BASICs", even the latest iterations of Blitz are limited sandboxes in comparison.

Mainstream Amiga programming in C or assembly language was very expensive compared to today. As a teen I couldn't afford Devpac, or the Hardware Reference Manual, but Blitz gave me what I needed to make real progress as a programmer. One of my friends even got texture-mapped 3d going, although it wasn't quick!

This. It might seem odd to some to combine BASIC and assembler but a programmer friend of mine used that ability to start playing with assembler (which he'd never done before) and experimented with replacing some BASIC routines in his games with assembler. As a relative newbie his socks were blown off at the speed-up he could achieve, I feel sure that it spurred him on in his programming career. (Ironically he is now a contract programmer writing corporate software in Java, but there you go...!)