My 2005 experience with languages was less interesting. I finished university, and started to work at a research center on Bioinformatics, trying to decide what should I do next (work? PhD? try to make a startup?).

I really liked bioinformarics how they introduced us back at the university, being all a thing of concurrency, synchronizzation and programming languages (as I learned later, this is a branch called System Biology).
Well, in the real world (TM) the language of choice of Bioinformaticians is.. perl.
And they (too often) use it NOT how it was meant to be: the 'duct tape' of programming language, to glue together different pieces written by different people in different envirnoment. For this task, perl works like a charm. And it is very easy too... but Larry Wall claim (Perl make easy things easy, and difficult things not impossible) stops at the first sentence. The second one is not wrong, but having seen some perl hacks, it is better said "and difficult things very messy".

And biologists use it because it is messy. Declare varaibles? Why? Not using goto? It is one of the instructions, why can't I use it?

All together, I am glad I learned perl. It has some very interesting stuff (hash tables, file manipulation, a neat database interface that many should learn from) and, above all, is the father of Perl regular expressions. It is un-matched in the field of text-file manipulation.
But surely, it is better remeber that you don't build an house out of duct tape..