My first usefull scripting language was awk.
In one of my first jobs I had access to 3 GNU/Linux machines (with very restrict access of course :) on which I came to get in contact for the first time with this amazing culture of [U|GNU\/Li]nix world, full of very specific little programs that could with a great flexibility be glued in shell scripts, all of then had manual pages which could be read through another program called man. And as I travelled through documentation of new and useful programs (using the oracle too) I´ve ended finding awk.

It was a simple language (though Turing complete), with built-in functions for text manipulations (substring, length, substitution, etc) and the body of your script is always executed to all lines from input. Pretty handy but also limited if you need to parse several files (which I handled using bash), however this is possible too. But in the end it proved pretty well that till now it´s a usefull item to have in your toolbox :)

Even though I want more. I want a dynamic language, a very expressive one with a clear and simple syntax. This is my motivation to learn Python and Ruby.
I´ve started already with Python. In my next post I´ll point a list of the main characteristics I´m looking for.
See ya.