E. K. Virtanen was a great contributor to the BASIC world, but left a few years ago. I think he had no time anymore for programming. He was even some time the admin/owner of basicprogramming.org if I remember correctly.
Yep. Without E. K. Virtanen, we wouldn't have this small BASIC community we still enjoy today (even, if it's much smaller now). When I entered BASIC world, he was an owner, admin and main contributor to basicprogramming forum, wiki and at least two more sites dedicated to retro stuff. He did a couple of interviews with BASIC developers and generally kept everything together. Two years after he quit, basicprogramming forum was no more. He was also developing a small retro BASIC interpreter. His contribution was far more important than that of Peter Verhas, who was just one of many developers and, let's be honest, not really important one. According to John, Peter Verhas decided to created ScriptBasic only because he was unaware of Python existence. Then he abandoned it, moved to Java and didn't really care what was going on with his interpreter. I'm pretty sure he's a brilliant programmer, but this "BASIC hero" status some users have granted him is completely out of proportion.
Derek left also because of lack of time. He was one of the first contributors long before bp.org - there was a special forum dedicated to Yabasic where all began.
Derek was the admin who banned me for requesting my account to be deleted. This I will remember forever.