I have always been fascinated by computers since my childhood, and the natural response is the urge to learn programming. An ancient computer science textbook taught me about those mysterious languages that I can use to communicate with the machine. The low level assembly, the in-between C language, the high-level Fortran, the beginner friendlier BASIC and BASICA, and the super-intelligent AI language LISP.
I never had the opportunity to try programming at that time, since I was born not even in the United Nations' legislation, and well after the micro-computer era. But those names stayed in my mind for a long time. To me these were like the names of mythological creatures, far away and beyond my intelligence to conceive. They are magick, and Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and John Carmack are gods.
Then the Internet happened.
Nowadays, I am the fairly common script kid with some narrow-minded opinions on programming, but have nothing to contribute to open source projects nor accomplished anything noteworthy. So I may as well write for my own pleasure.
My favorite programming language is still Lua. It is pragmatic and down to earth. No magic happens, yet the coding loop is so tight and rewarding. Learning just a few things, and every task is simple and doable. And the more one uses it, the more it comes clear that the design decisions are all well thought out, and not much can be nitpicked, except perhaps the style preferences. The extensibility and interoperability is wonderful, thanks to C language's prevalence. The datatypes are powerful for all purposes.
And I would probably never get to use it professionally, which is good, I figure. Those fun toy projects I have written in Lua: an assembler for MIPS, a SQL-subset statement parser, and a data visualizer for data blocks, still look pretty awesome to my eyes. As I have achieved something.