A little Tcl story. When John Ousterhout interviewed me to be VP of Engineering at the Tcl company (Scriptics) many years ago I told him I knew nothing about Tcl at all. He told me that the two great virtues of Tcl were that it was incredibly easy to learn and had very powerful regular expression facilities (I think he was trying to contrast with Perl which also has great regular expressions).
I blurted out "Don't those two things contradict each other? You can't have something that's easy and have regular expressions!".
I immediately figured I'd totally blown my chances and discovered afterwards from the recruiter that the one thing he really liked in candidates was to be challenged. Me and my big mouth got me that job.
My first developer job was for a company which used Vignette StoryServer which used Tcl for its primary scripting language. You actually wrote all the Tcl inside a Java based tool (I think there was a way to use an external editor but it was clunky has hell(. We actually did most of our dynamic stuff in Perl via traditional CGI but all the straight CMS work was done inside StoryServer's tools. One of the vagaries of that system was that if you needed to escape an opening bracket "[" you needed to use 2x + 1 (memory is hazy on the exact number) the number of backslashes for every level of brackets you were in. So if you were 3 brackets deep you needed to escape a bracket it would be "\\\\\\\\\["
Otherwise actually I ended up kind of liking Tcl (in some ways I liked the language more then Perl, but the environment we were working in was pretty terrible) and that experience actually translated really well when I play around with objective C for iOS.
I blurted out "Don't those two things contradict each other? You can't have something that's easy and have regular expressions!".
I immediately figured I'd totally blown my chances and discovered afterwards from the recruiter that the one thing he really liked in candidates was to be challenged. Me and my big mouth got me that job.