other: it depends on what you mean by "interested". On a regular basis, I actually use the ones marked $work, but here's my :
- $work: proprietary language for controlling the instruments for automated test equipment
- $work: used to use C/C++ a lot for older now-retired test equipment
- $work: VBA for making Excel data manipulation easier; if my products ever move to a different equipment, there's a good possibility that the next one will be Excel/VBA-based
- $work: a bit of unixish scripting languages for automating things that don't need the power of Perl
- $home: a smattering of Python to automate Notepad++. My library offers access to lynda.com, so over the holidays I watched the Lynda.com "Python Essentials" by Bill Weinman to "up my game" a bit, to maybe get me to the point that I don't have to look up every piece of syntax every couple of months. I don't think it worked.
Comparing his Python Essentials to his Perl Essentials, it's obvious he likes the snake more: he covers a bunch of stuff in Python that he didn't in Perl (like database access and higher-order functions) which could have been covered at an equal level in his Perl class, but he didn't even try, implicitly saying that "Python is better for those". And I was upset that he didn't cover CPAN for perl or pip/Pypi.
- $home: a smattering of JavaScript, though like my Python, never enough that I can write a script without looking up basic functionality
- $college: I did some Matlab back in college, but over 20 years, I've lost any such skills
- $history: Just before college, I started playing with Smalltalk on an old late-80s Tektronix mainframe that my dad brought home from work, saving from the junk heap; unfortunately, the hardware was too unreliable for me to get thru more than the tutorial. (That was also my first exposure to unixish stuff)
- $history: Taught myself C in high school to draw pretty fractals. It was my familiarity with C that made it so easy for me to pick up early-90's perl (it was probably perl 4 at the time) for doing my first CGI in my www.<i>college</i>.edu/~username website in the days when most people were using lynx to browse the web, and gopher: links could still be found on websites.
- $history: TI-99/4A BASIC/Extended BASIC = my introduction to programming in 1984. I recently rescued our old TI from my Mom's garage sale, and have had fun showing kids BASIC, LOGO, and our old video games (Parsec rules!)
