<% %> was my -first interaction- with a programming language. FrontPage used it through ASP, so I wanted to try it out (and Feel Cool™). Didn't get a bit of it.
The necessary evil. I really GOT into PHP. I just did what needed to be done in order for my sites to work. At Facebook I only used it through the company's template engine. Same with WordPress.
Anything I do now in PHP is related to helping get my fiancé's sites to work.
Sure, I used Javascript, but I never understood it until two years ago. This is only because I started using jQuery. So, no, I've never worked with raw Javascript, but this is as close as I'm going to get to it.
"My First Programming Language™" would have to be this one. I got into it solely because of Django, but its style fits my obsessive compulsive perfectionist nature perfectly. I can confidently say that I understand what goes in when looking at a Python script.
The allure of the native iPhone application finally hit me this year. It only took having some viable ideas of my own that gave me the motivation to jump into learning what most people tend to see as an "everybody wants to do it, but few follow through" type of language. Objective-C has provided me with a lot of new experiences and feelings of accomplishment, mainly because I'm building for a device for the first time.
