Not really a dumb reason, but back in the day I was stuck in the WordPress developer loop and tired of it. I was pretty familiar with a handful of languages, but wasn't doing much more than setting up themes and building out pages with builders.
One day I heard the CTO talking about a tool he would love to have but couldn't find anything that worked how he needed it to. The CTO was a big buzzword guy and recently shared an article with my manager at the time about how C++ was "the best language". So naturally I chimed in and told him I could build that tool easy peasy and I would use C++ obviously because it's the best language.
It was such a simple tool, basically just matching phrases and categories and spitting out a list of options. It took me months to make, but I learned a lot and it kind of worked for the most part and everyone was happy. I eventually got a de-facto department in the company where I would just build internal tools and handle some legacy codebases that they were previously outsourcing.
I later on got my current job because of that leap.
TLDR: I learned C++ because I was bored and lied that I already knew it.
I liked the OCaml website
I learned Applesoft BASIC to draw a surprise Dickbutt.
If we're counting machine code, I learned 6502 ASM for faster division on NES, because it was half the CPU time on my first-person shooter. After many iterations pushing it down to mere hundreds of cycles, I slapped my forehead and implemented log tables in like 512 bytes and 45 cycles. It's negligible now. And supports constant fractional scaling. And has overflow / underflow saturation. Really, 6502 ASM is fantastic to fuck around in, even though the rest of the NES's hardware suuucks.
For work.
Same as everyone, to produce reports.
I, as a teacher, have had to learn several languages, but that's not the dumb reason bit. The dumb reason bit was WHY I had to teach Python, which once I learnt it (so I cold teach it) I could see right away was NOT a suitable language for teaching to Year 7 (who up to now have only used Scratch). I was teaching the U.K. curriculum, and I found out that teaching C# was also allowed - still not ideal, but better than Python for learners -but pretty much all schools were teaching Python. When I dug into it I found I was far from alone in not wanting to use Python... and I also found out the reason schools were teaching Python. It was because from an ADMINISTRATIVE point of view it was much easier for the schools to have us teaching Python. In other words, the office-workers who didn't have to teach it, only had to admin it, were forcing everyone to teach Python because they wanted the lower overhead that came with installing/maintaining that vs. C#. ARGH! All the teachers who wanted to teach C# were running into exactly the same road-block.
I learned a bit of KOBOL after hearing it was the weirdest, hardest, and most unused programming language back in highschool. But only really enough to do a hello world and other very simplistic programs. More because finding resources at that time was difficult.
Income
We found a RCE on a server during pentest. In KOBOL.
Learning how to make a reverse shell in KOBOL was pretty unique experience. Thankfully, we found another path to DA ajd didn't have to continue, but maan, learning KOBOL, especially of your use-case is niche, is borderline esoteric.
I was playing this really simple mobile phone game, where you basically go on these mining trips, then you tap the screen as quickly as possible. So, I thought to myself, I wonder if there's a way to simulate screen taps, to tap at superhuman speeds.
I found an app for that, this app had its own scripting language. Admittedly, there weren't many concepts to learn in this language, but wait, there's more.
Then I thought, maybe I can also automate the menus, between the mining trips.
But this language didn't have support for multiple files, nor functions, you couldn't even use labels in your goto statements, meaning my code started to get quite complicated.So, I actually sort of implemented support for goto labels / shitty functions within my program.
Basically, at the start of the file, I had an if-else block, which read the value of a variable and based on that, it would select between different goto statements.
So, if I wanted to "call a function", I would set the variable to the function/label name and thengoto 0.If I remember correctly, I did still need to manually update the line numbers in that lookup table at the start, but at least, I didn't have to do it everywhere in the code anymore.
And yes, I did manage to completely automate grinding that game, using this shitty scripting language.
It was an offline game, and not a good one, I didn't actually care about making progress in it. But scripting it was significantly more fun than playing it myself.I was a teacher's assistant in beginner's programming at university for a bit. I expected them to learn C, which I knew enough of, but I got assigned to a group that learned Python instead. I had never used Python at the time. I ended up having to speed learn it while trying to teach it, to not be completely useless.
Had to learn Javascript for web development class.
In all seriousness, I found out about Nim from the debug log of a discord bot and decided to give it a shot. It's now my favorite programming language.
It's hyperbole, but I learned my first language because I wanted to be a god.
I saw these magic windows that popped up, that had buttons, and I was jealous of these godly creators holding the power to make them do as they wanted. So, I learned it myself. I peeked at another program I was using, it was using python and PyQt so that's what I set out with to become my own god of the desktop.
My first program was a GUI wrapper around the YouTube-dl CLI, and I still use it frequently.
I was going to learn !hare@programming.dev just because it is called "Hare" and I like rabbits, but then I saw that I am not on a supported OS.
Objects weren't properly saving in a game, so the developer showed me what code I could copy paste to enable objects to save. Much like Thanos, "fine, I'll do it myself".
I inherited a C# code base that had a custom runtime loader for APL modules. Over half of the app was actually written in APL with C# just hosting the API.. so yeah, had to learn that. I don't recommend it but some people seem to really love the language. Those people are often statisticians, not programmers.
Learned flash in the 90's to make terrible games.
Maybe not dumb but I've definitely been forced to at least partly learn a few terrible languages so I could use some system:
- PHP so I could write custom linters for Phabricator. Pretty successful. PHP is a bad language but it's fairly easy to read and write.
- Ruby so I could understand what the hell Gitlab is doing. Total failure here, Ruby is completely incomprehensible especially in a large codebase.
- OCaml so I can work on a super niche compiler written in OCaml. It's a decent language except the syntax is pretty terrible, OPAM is super buggy, and I dunno if it's this codebase or just OCaml people in general but there are approximately zero comments and identifiers are like
ityp,nsec,ef_bin... The sort of names where you already need to know what they are.
Ruby because it was the first popular Japanese language. I wrote a few useful scripts and it was nice. Then it was swallowed by Rails, and killed by Python. No one uses it around me but it was fun.
Somewhere before 2010, when I was still on Windows on my laptop and using AutoHotkey, I learned a dialect of Basic. To write an application starter on my USB stick, when going to internet cafes. The starters job was just to run my AutoHotkey script with AutoHotkey interpreter. I never used the Basic language again. I actually forgot which dialect, maybe FreeBasic.
Might not be dumb, but I learned programming to create things and learn how things worked. Started with entering in hundreds of lines of BASIC printed in magazines, including debugging font typos.
Then learned MUF, or Multi-User Forth, a stack-based text language for creating text based dungeons, and managed to stop some malicious users spying and people's privacy in the server.
Every so often, I pick up a new language to test it to see if it does cool stuff or help me further learn more about how things function.
Python. To write mods for renpy 'games'.
Needed to write a syntax highlighter for VB.Net but I couldn't find any weirdly written edge cases online, so I had to make some myself.
Profit.
