I hate programming.

I hate programming and all I have programmed in is Matlab.

Edit: I hate it so much I double posted it.

Java blows. There's no way around it. The only reason anyone uses Java is because they've already gone through the pain of learning it, and now they feel obligated to use it.

I don't have any experience with any variant of C, so I have no opinion there.

PHP is fine for little jobs, but tends to end up being a gigantic sloppy mess on any non-trivial project. Way too much bad PHP code out there.

ASP is like PHP, if PHP had been written by Satan.

Python, however, is a thing of beauty and elegance. Usually.

Taiden, your parser shouldn't have sucked too hard. Feedparser's pretty straightforward.

Due to my job... i've been working with the following lately:

SQL (Jet/Access and SQL Server variants) Jet stinks, server is much better.
C# - not bad at all
VB 6 - tolerable
PHP - fun, but occasionally lacking discipline

The funny thing is that, at this point, I could probably write a better stored procedure in SQL than a "Hello World" in Java.

Being able to do simple programming in a scripting language like Perl is super useful. There are tons of times in only vaguely technical jobs that I've come up against a big bunch of munged up data in a plain text file that can only be fixed with some fancy scripting.

Learning to code in a classroom environment was hard for me. I was comfy doing basic unix scripts and DOS batch files at 14 and making money programming in a C-based language when I was 16. I couldn't stand my C++ class in college, though. It's a lot more fun when you're working on your own problem rather than trying to do the problem your teacher dreamed up, especially when the language is fairly flexible coughperlcough. Wasting 6 hours doing something I like? OK. Wasting 6 hours on an exercise some professor came up with? Not OK.

the most complex stuff I've worked with is HTML, and that only brought limited success and was a bit of a self-taught pet project a few years back that I never got around to sticking on the web, mainly because I couldn't be bothered to find someplace to host it. that, and it was a "see if I can" type deal that had no useful purpose at all