As a relative newbie to PB (found it about a year or so ago) I looked at many, many languages with which I might restart my programming interest (which started what seems like many years ago with 8bit Basics and various assembly languages).
Funnily enough I looked at D
In the end I decided that what I liked the most was making the computer do things, that's where the satisfaction is for me. And all of this looking and learning new programming languages kind of got in the way of that. So, I thought what do I know well. Well, I know Basic well and I know assembler reasonably (assuming I could remember any of it, haha). Why learn something different?
But I didn't want any old Basic. I wanted something powerful. I value powerful languages that let you do what you want at both a low level (if you want to) but also at a high level too.
I didn't want a language that relied on a runtime so VB was out -also it appeared extremely bloated to me like most MS stuff (both VS and the language runtime, etc.) and I didn't like that, plus you couldn't get your hands dirty. Also, it didn't seem very fast from some tests I performed. Oh and, it was very OO biased.
I won't go through the many other Basics I looked at but it was clear that there weren't that many that gave me both powerful high-level built-in functions (and I rather like that rather than calling external libraries, etc - what's wrong with powerful built-in commands), access to assembler, no bloaty runtimes, fast code, and game-oriented, hardware accelerated support. The latter was very important.
And one other thing...ever since I learned about OO in school, it didn't resonate with me. Over the years I've tried time and again to understand its benefits but can't. Either it's me (and I'm happy to believe that) or there's something rather sinister about it's proliferation around the software world

Sorry, I don't want to promote any more bad feeling.
What I'm trying to say is that I didn't want an OO language, I wanted a procedural, modern language and the other one that fit the bill was PureBasic. I love it. It does what it does very well and I can see no reason why, with so many other OO choices (Basics included), PB needs to be one. If it was OO, I would have moved on.
Keep up the good work guys. Keep PB doing what PB does best!