The desire to play with obscure programming languages

There’s something fascinating about learning and experimenting with niche, lesser-known programming languages. I think it’s the same curiosity that draws me to spoken languages, if I could choose any superpower, it would definitely be the ability to speak all human languages.

It’s the romantic idea of discovering something and becoming proficient at it, something that not many people know or understand and say “Hey, I can speak that language that only 0.0625% of the world knows!”.

Two of the obscure languages I experimented with were Go and Nim. I picked up Go fairly quickly, following tutorials and guides back in 2016 at my old job. At the time, Go was still quite niche but starting to gain traction, and it feels nice, years later, to say I was among the first to believe in it. Nim, on the other hand, remains quite obscure even after all these years, not many people have heard of it. To be honest, I haven’t used it in a while, but it was a lot of fun to work with.

Is it even worth spending time on this? I’d say yes. Curiosity is a good thing, it might lead you to the next big idea or help you learn concepts that can be applied elsewhere. Even if that obscure thing never finds a practical use, it’s perfectly fine to explore without a plan and simply enjoy the process of discovery.