Learnt "BASIC with Dino" in primary school ('87) on TIKI 100 (Norwegian computers, like C64). Programmed games in AMOS (Amiga, BASIC with sprites and bobs, coll

Learnt "BASIC with Dino" in primary school ('87) on TIKI 100 (Norwegian computers, like C64). Programmed games in AMOS (Amiga, BASIC with sprites and bobs, collision detection etc). Did some QBASIC, and Visual Basic. A bit of BZ (scripting language for BBS). Didn't do much programming for a bunch of years. In 2004, I was living in an apartment in China, with a lot of time on my hands. Heard about Python and Ruby - gave Python a try, but got stuck on something trivial and had nobody to help me. With Ruby, I didn't get stuck. Used it on and off for years for small private projects, and two NGO internships where I used Ruby and RoR (but wasn't hired for it). Still use Ruby for a lot of side projects, text wrangling, scraping etc. Began learning R for data wrangling/statistics/visualization. Amazing ecosystem, annoying language. Heard about Clojure and began playing with it after reading lots of interesting blog posts etc. My first intro to Lisp and functional programming. Liked a lot of it, but not crazy about JVM and stack-traces. Through reading about Clojure, got interested in Haskell, and read a bunch about it - very interesting exposure to a ton of new concepts (which Clojure had warmed me up for). Also began looking at Julia for statistics, and lately had a look at both Nimrod and Elixir (which again introduced me to lot's of new ideas from Erland). I've learnt a huge amount in the last year, and had my eyes opened to new paradigms. Still haven't really settled on anything new, and in the meantime I keep going back to Ruby and R to get stuff done. Going back many years, choosing Python instead of Ruby might have been a better choice - it's clearly far ahead of Ruby in terms of academia - data science, machine learning, IPython Notebook, etc. However, knowing Ruby Python is almost too similar - like learning French while speaking Spanish... I can already read it, and don't feel motivated to spend the time to learn it, more attracted by new languages with other paradigms etc. (Why I'm spending time learning Russian as well :)).