Nice analogies
I started life in the wonderful world of BASIC (ZX-81 initially, then Apple II), then spent a few years wandering the desert - looking for a computer.
Did more basic work in BASIC on PET's and 8040's for a year - discovering that there's a limit to how much the average bear is willing to do with antiques...
I moved into Hypertext/AppleScript/macros/etc. for a few years - never quite finding the joy that programming should bring... It was always a struggle to find clean solutions to simple problems.
My next adventure was reading "almost" sql code on some old SunOS systems - back in the days of the pizza box! I got my feet wet reading c code, but didn't do any development of my own. Mostly cleaning up bourne scripts, etc.
Fast forward a few years (and a few hundred simple sh/bash/csh/ksh scripts), and I was introduced to Perl. My first thought was, "what a mess", but after a bit of mentoring by a co-worker, I was happy to say that I'd found my new religion.
I don't get an opportunity to do as much development work as I'd like, but it seems that I pull out perl to try to solve every problem that I encounter! I've been a UNIX analyst for a good many years now, but I never really used sed or awk beyond a very cursory requirement. Since joining this board, I've discovered that these two little tools are awfully darned handy, and could reduce some of my reliance on perl.
Not that I'll stop using perl - gosh no - but it never hurts to learn a little more!
Some other languages that I've picked up and then put down along the way include C, C++, Pascal, tcl, PHP, Python, Java/javascript