I had been interested in a couple of obscure languages: I worked some Euler problems in OCaml (which I liked for type inference and its pragmatism relative to s

I had been interested in a couple of obscure languages: I worked some Euler problems in OCaml (which I liked for type inference and its pragmatism relative to some more purely functional languages), and I was fascinated by Lua because of how it got a lot done with a relatively straightforward design and small implementation. Neither stuck, because I didn't have or couldn't find the tools/libs to do anything with them that I couldn't more easily do with a language I already knew. I started playing with Go this year 'cause there's really great introductory material/tools out there (seriously: boosters of any relatively obscure programming language ought to be outright cloning {tour,play}.golang.org, the readable spec and other introductory docs, etc.) and I had an idea for a fun sideproject that involved some bit-slinging that would've been hard to do efficiently in portable Python. (Much earlier I'd started another such proj in C++, but honestly the going was slow enough, and the frustration dealing with unsafe threading and memory access was great enough, that it eventually didn't really seem worth it.) How I started on Perl may make a better story: I didn't know a dang thing about it, as I recall, when during college I became a summer intern for a nonprofit with a surprisingly-advanced-for-the-time-and-context mod_perl site. (I had been hacking C/C++ for school and fun, and had played with QBasic and MS Visual Basic as a kid.) I mostly picked it up by the seat of my pants, initially writing low-stakes backend things and then filling their actual infrastructure with horrible regexps (I hadn't yet grasped that there are many tricks you can do but shouldn't, maybe). I still do work for that client and Perl now seems a bit crazymaking, but I was impressed at the time with how straightforward it made a lot of the basic tasks of running dynamic Web sites. Fun times. (Nowadays Python and JavaScript are the languages providing most of the daily bread, as they probably are for many folks here.)