Early days
Ever since I was a language-maniac. I started programming on an ATARI ST with LOGO when I was a child. Later on I used APL, GFA Basic, Omikron Basic, Pure Pascal and 68000 Assembler on the same hardware until I made the switch to the PC world in about 1994. There I used QBasic, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C/C++, x86 Assembler under MSDOS, then Visual C++, Borland C++, Delphi and Watcom C++ under Windows.
Internet age
Once the internet became available, I read about almost every language out there I could find. During the late 1990s and early 2000s this resulted in a page, which lists examples in over 130 programming languages.
Discovering Ruby
In the late 1990s, I first got into contact with scripting languages, mainly Python. Then in 1998, I discovered Ruby. The tutorial written by GOTO Kentaru was still mostly written in japanese, but the code was so easy that I could understand it. The same night I was in love with that great language, and this lasts till today. At that time, Ruby was hardly known to anyone outside of Japan, except a handful of people worldwide. Then in February 1999, the 234th post is my first post to the english speaking ruby-talk mailing list, followed by lots of small libraries written by myself.
In 2001, in my 3rd term at university, I accept the offer from Syngress Publishing (now Elsevier) to lead the authoring of a book about Ruby. In 2003, together with Armin Roehrl and Stefan Schmiedl (who wrote a german book about Ruby), we organize the first European Ruby Conference (EuRuKo) which takes places at the University of Karlsruhe. The two following years I am also involved in the conferences held in Munich, meeting great guys I was working with before remotely.
Discovering Rust
During the years, it becomes more and more evident that Ruby is too slow for certain types of applications. So my work mainly consists in optimizing legacy Ruby code, converting parts to C/C++ or using Erlang for solving highly concurrent problems. When it comes to predictable performance, there is no way around C or C++ at that time. Rust changes everything! I discover Rust in 2012, after spending some time with D and Go, but the way they handle slices is just awful. Rust is very similar to Cyclone, just that Cyclone never reached the critical mass. Again I know that this language (Rust) will once become an important player.
Today
Today I am playing a bit with Idris, a Haskell-like language with dependent types. Also I am looking into alternatives to avoid writing Javascript code, for example Purescript, Typescript or Haxe. But none of those languages I really find appealing enough or do not meet my criterias.
Other languages
I worked with other languages as well: Smalltalk (Cincom Smalltalk), Java, C#, Beta, Ada, Standard ML (MLton), Concurrent Clean, Objective Caml, Oz/Mozart, Perl, PHP, Tcl.