Ask HN: How did you get started with the programming languages you use?

I later decided after doing a fair amount of front end design work for friends and family that I'd try and learn back end development, so I tried python again, using the flask microframework. I did a few small projects with that, then I found sinatra on ruby and ended up really enjoying ruby more than python. I ended up working pretty much entirely in ruby for any back end dev stuff (although it wasn't very much), and slowly improved my javascript skills.

During Uni, I have also learned enough C# to make my way around. In my second year, I got a job doing front and back end dev, and made my first big project using sinatra and I loved it.

Later on we needed to write some software that interfaced with a label printer, and the best library we could find was for java, which none of us knew (nor did we want to learn). I had been reading about clojure and liked the look of it (and heard that it had great java interop) and I made my first (very dodgy) clojure app to interface with the printer.

I got hooked on functional programming then, and in the past year and a half, I've learned up on a few different languages. I have vastly improved my Javascript skills after using Backbone.js and then Angular.js. I also improved my Clojure skills, by re-writing my first work sinatra app using compojure, as well as a few side projects. I also took an interest in Erlang and Elixir after hearing about both on HN, and I learned the basics by reading 'Learn you an Erlang', and trying to make a few small project in both. I'd love to use Elixir some more, but I don't have a good project idea that suits it's use-case. Just recently I also learned C in a uni subject.

I'm always looking to expand my programming knowledge, I just have trouble coming up with ideas of what to program!

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.)

First was the use of atoms. I am not too proud to say it, but when I as a beginner I used lots of "magic strings" in my code. I found them a lot more easier to understand.Stuff like

if(a="run") //some piece of code here

was common in my code. Of course the best practice was to use a bool run, but I had to train myself to stop using magic strings when I found out that it was bad practice.

In erlang however it is very common to use literal values which are known as atoms. So for instance an atom "blue" is blue. It does not have anything associated with it(well internally it is represented as an integer). You can't perform any operations on it, you can't change it etc. And it immediately clicked with me

The second thing was pattern matching

You have got to use pattern matching to see how awesome it is. It allows you to make your programes much more readable by dividing your function into a group of clauses. A clause will be executed only if a corresponding pattern matches to it. If you use it well you can grasp the flow of your program in a single reading.

There was other really cool stuff about erlang like otp, concurrency etc but when I started with it the only things that I cared for were atoms and pattern matching.They got me started with erlang. Now that I have used erlang a bit more I find things like gen_events and gen_fsm behaviors invaluable for the stuff that I am trying to do.

That is all.

Recently, I've started using Clojure and think it'll rapidly become my go-to language (actually wrote about why just yesterday[1]).

TL;DR is that I went looking for a faster alternative to Ruby, tried Go, ended up happy with Clojure for being dynamic, fast and functional.

In the past I suppose the least common language I ended up with was TCL, about 9-10 years ago. The reason was that I wanted to develop a GUI application, but my attempts to learn GTK or Qt or Swing natively proved too complicated for me at the time. There was in fact a great TCL wrapper for GTK that turned out to be really easy to use.

I ended up using TCL for several years and still have a fond memory of it. The coolest feature I remembered was being able to package up TCL into native, distributable packages - Starpacks[2] - complete with libraries, interpreter and app code in a single binary. Around 2000, this was amazing to me, and I was stunned more people weren't using it. I suspect one of the main things holding TCL back was in fact their lagging GUI support at the time. Mention TCL and people would wince at their memories of using Tk GUI apps.

[1] https://hackworth.be/arriving-at-clojure/

[2] http://wiki.tcl.tk/3663