As my high school Spanish teacher used to say, nothing is better for expanding someone's horizons than learning a new language. I agree with her one hundred percent, but something tells me she didn't have Pike in mind. It is simple to learn, does not require long compilation passes and has powerful built-in data types allowing simple and fast data manipulation here.
Pike is simple to use and fast, too.
This is a programming language, due to its age and proximity to the Internet, that has evolved since its introduction. It's main distribution and copyright are overseen by Roxen Internet Software, who pledge that Pike will continue to be developed, improved upon, and most importantly of all, will remain free software. When needed, you can also write Pike modules in C, to gain better performance or access C libraries.