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.
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.
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.
