Wanting to get into the videogames industry.

Not really a dumb reason, but back in the day I was stuck in the WordPress developer loop and tired of it. I was pretty familiar with a handful of languages, but wasn't doing much more than setting up themes and building out pages with builders.

One day I heard the CTO talking about a tool he would love to have but couldn't find anything that worked how he needed it to. The CTO was a big buzzword guy and recently shared an article with my manager at the time about how C++ was "the best language". So naturally I chimed in and told him I could build that tool easy peasy and I would use C++ obviously because it's the best language.

It was such a simple tool, basically just matching phrases and categories and spitting out a list of options. It took me months to make, but I learned a lot and it kind of worked for the most part and everyone was happy. I eventually got a de-facto department in the company where I would just build internal tools and handle some legacy codebases that they were previously outsourcing.

I later on got my current job because of that leap.

TLDR: I learned C++ because I was bored and lied that I already knew it.

I learned bash instead of python because my 8 year old brain saw all the parentheses and thought "ew no"...

I was trying to rank up in Codewars, and there was a 1kyu (hardest and worth the most points) kata only available in OCaml, so I learned it in order to solve.

I learned lolcode in college because we had to write a sorting algorithm in assembly and "any other programming language."

I liked the OCaml website

I was playing this really simple mobile phone game, where you basically go on these mining trips, then you tap the screen as quickly as possible. So, I thought to myself, I wonder if there's a way to simulate screen taps, to tap at superhuman speeds.

I found an app for that, this app had its own scripting language. Admittedly, there weren't many concepts to learn in this language, but wait, there's more.

Then I thought, maybe I can also automate the menus, between the mining trips.
But this language didn't have support for multiple files, nor functions, you couldn't even use labels in your goto statements, meaning my code started to get quite complicated.

So, I actually sort of implemented support for goto labels / shitty functions within my program.

Basically, at the start of the file, I had an if-else block, which read the value of a variable and based on that, it would select between different goto statements.
So, if I wanted to "call a function", I would set the variable to the function/label name and then goto 0.

If I remember correctly, I did still need to manually update the line numbers in that lookup table at the start, but at least, I didn't have to do it everywhere in the code anymore.

And yes, I did manage to completely automate grinding that game, using this shitty scripting language.
It was an offline game, and not a good one, I didn't actually care about making progress in it. But scripting it was significantly more fun than playing it myself.

To understand memes

Because I wanted to listen to music while doing the dishes.

The Jellyfin Roku client didn't support audio playback, so I wrote it myself... while learning Roku's proprietary language 🙄

"Gods, that's stupid. Why is it being done this way? Have they never heard of naming conventions? Is the language really that awfully designed?"

Learns PHP to find out more.

"Yup..."

I, as a teacher, have had to learn several languages, but that's not the dumb reason bit. The dumb reason bit was WHY I had to teach Python, which once I learnt it (so I cold teach it) I could see right away was NOT a suitable language for teaching to Year 7 (who up to now have only used Scratch). I was teaching the U.K. curriculum, and I found out that teaching C# was also allowed - still not ideal, but better than Python for learners -but pretty much all schools were teaching Python. When I dug into it I found I was far from alone in not wanting to use Python... and I also found out the reason schools were teaching Python. It was because from an ADMINISTRATIVE point of view it was much easier for the schools to have us teaching Python. In other words, the office-workers who didn't have to teach it, only had to admin it, were forcing everyone to teach Python because they wanted the lower overhead that came with installing/maintaining that vs. C#. ARGH! All the teachers who wanted to teach C# were running into exactly the same road-block.

Arduino and Python to create a sexy machine that syncs up to videos. Oh I also made the sex machine part, like machining metal parts and soldering electronics.

to prank people using school computers

I learned Go because I really liked the keyword go