When I was 16, my first job was working in artificial intelligence for my boss. I helped him implement genetic algoithms in c. I understood the broad concept, but he explain what he needed done: particular data manipulations, file maint.. it was fun. It was where I learned to write real life things for someone else for my first time.

At the same time, I was a big OS/2 person. It was fun. And the web started to take off back then. Back when irc was cool, or is it not? Anyway, I had a huge ass database bot-related data to give a web interface to. I wrote it in C. It was neat.

Eventually, I grew tired of doing things in C (18) for the web, and heard that perl was good at that, for my next project. CGIc was cool, but even using the non-perl-module way of doing it was simpler than CGIc. Thus, I learned perl4 and 5, since there was a transition between the two and needed.

Man, I still remember getting pissed about TMTOWTDI, specifically:

print("1");
print "1";
print 1;

Update: Added some other info.