My first real language. Piecing together a site for an obscure game server, I got tired of having to copy and paste the menu area between every page every time I changed it. A friend of mine suggested PHP, and I googled it and landed on the "include" statement. From then I kept creating things, poring over other peoples' code to learn it until I fully grasped everything. Nowadays the language isn't very appealing. I hope this "end year" is true.
My first language after PHP. Tackled it during the Rails frenzy. Blew my mind (more in a sense of "wtf" than "omg"). Blew it off for a while. Came full circle recently and approached it again after having Haskell, Lisps, C, etc. under my belt, and it wasn't confusing at all.
A nice language, but I rarely use it. Only major project I used it for was the RO server, and I eventually switched it to Haskell. And then to Erlang. I like Ruby's wacky flexibility and cuteness better for when I need a scripting language.
Finally got around to diving in last year. Wish I used it more, frankly; I love simple languages. There's this itch I keep having for doing low-level programming and writing something large-scale in C, but I've never gotten around to scratching it.
My favorite language, period. Mindblowing at first, now I like to believe I have a fairly solid grasp of it. The expressiveness that can be achieved even with such strictness and purity, coupled with the raw performance, is astounding.
