I started programming with QBasic that was shipped with Windows 3.11. After some time I came up with some code to read a file, and do a basic substitution encryption.

It was three pages on the 80x25 screen, and I was proud. So I showed it to a friend, and he told me that it could be done in one line of Perl. I didn't believe him, but he showed me that it works (I don't remember what it was, but know I think it must have been perl -pe '$_=lc;tr/a..z/thekyhr.../' or so).

I tried a few other languages, notably Pascal, C and Eiffel, and I always found string processing to be too cumbersome. Now and then I remembered about that magic Perl thing that did complete programs in one line, and I decided to learn it. So I bought a (really crappy) book and started to program.

It has since then spoiled me, and I've found no other programming language that I liked better.