I learned VBA because excel is only useful for simple adhoc data manipulations without it. I then learned R because excel-based forecasting was a nightmare. I t

I learned VBA because excel is only useful for simple adhoc data manipulations without it. I then learned R because excel-based forecasting was a nightmare. I then learned Clojure because R was a terrible general purpose language. I then learned Ruby because the JVM startup time was really annoying for simple scripts and command line utilities. I then started to learn Rust because Ruby was slow and I was getting sick of dynamically typed runtime roulette (although Nimrod and D are starting to entice me more as Rust seems determined to turn into a research language). I also learned a few OpsResearch languages because you kinda have to if you want to use a lot of high performance LP/MIP/IP/Constraint solvers. I know that isn't the traditional language learning vector, but I'm not a traditional programmer. I work on problems very specific to Supply Chain Management, and programming turns out to be an incredible tool in the toolchest.