[probinso]

I can see why some people might use to-do lists as their go-to, but those often are not representative of actually exploring a language.

I guess there is probably a large community of people who only share publicly projects they consider portfolio Worthy. I have found sharing valuable in both failed and successful projects when interviewing, teaching, and spec'ing a new project.

You're correct in noting that some of these projects fail, but as long as there is sufficient code the projects they can often be interesting.

Sort of side projects that I pull together in another languages are often to explore language features that are not readily available in my common tongue. Certain languages have made completing certain tasks far easier like heavy Matrix programs in Octave or Julia, n-body simulators with extended unit types in Julia, multi-threaded cryptographic toy project in erlang, statistics problems and visualization in R, easy concurrent types and strong explicit typing for model train controller and Ada. I have also used a new language for a interview coding challenge (for fun).