> I'm basically looking into the more esoteric languages and design patterns at this point, trying to find concepts that expand my abilities and knowledge It l

> I'm basically looking into the more esoteric languages and design patterns at this point, trying to find concepts that expand my abilities and knowledge It looks like I'm a bit further on this particular road, so let me give some suggestions: 1. Take a look at array-based programming languages. I used J (google "J lang" or got to jsoftware.com). It's incredible how you can have a single, two characters long symbol encode concepts such as recursiveness and have that symbol be easily composable with any other function in the language. Learning J or APL or K will change the way you think about tables, probably influencing both your NumPy code and SQL code. 2. Try some concatenative languages. Forth and Factor are fine examples in this category. Forth is a very low-level, completely untyped language with built-in interactive mode; it's mostly built in itself and bootstraped with a bit of assembler. Factor is a modern language with rich data types and batteries-included style standard library. Both use stack for passing arguments and both are interactive, but that's all they have in common, so learning both is not a waste of time. 3. Learn a pure object-oriented language, like Smalltalk (I think Pharo is the most popular implementation right now). It's not at all Java-like experience, having only objects at your disposal is not that bad if you can make the objects behave just the way you want them to: even things like the stack are objects and can be inspected and manipulated like all other objects. There's also Io to look out for: it's not as impressive as a full Smalltalk environment, but it's even simpler semantically and allows easy syntactic extensions. 4. Learn a logic programming language. It's great for quickly solving silly puzzles. It's not bad for dealing with textual data. It honestly sucks for everything else, and everything else breaks the pure-logic semantics, so it's not that practical. It's a bit better when used as an embedded DSL from some other language. 5. Learn (delimited) continuations as implemented in Racket. There are other languages which support some form of continuations, and there are even some frameworks which use continuations in these languages (see Nagare web framework for Python or Seaside for Smalltalk). Continuations will give you tools for understanding generators, coroutines, restarts and many other language constructs.