For the purpose of fun, one place well worth a look is the Esoteric Languages wiki. You might also want to try some of the tasks on programming challenge websites such as Sphere Online Judge in several of the supported languages, to get a better feel for what you enjoy. That particular site supports a wide variety of languages, including some esoteric ones, and even has specific challenges that require an esoteric language such as brainfuck - or at least it did; I haven't been there in a few years, and I can't right now see how to search for challenges with particular types of requirement.

Another direction to go that might tie in with the day job would be SNOBOL, which was the first language to introduce 'pattern matching' as a first-class concept.


In reply to Re: Recommendations for fun programming languages ? by hv
in thread Recommendations for fun programming languages ? by rnaeye

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.