[noelwelsh]

This is great, but it's not addressing the point, which is "I am, however, very excited to try things that might reduce amount of bugs and potential security issues in my code, make it cheaper to run, cheaper to support."

Also, if you like math go learn some functional programming. The ideas of abstract algebra, which you will encounter in FP, are increasingly relevant to machine learning as well. E.g. http://jmlr.org/proceedings/papers/v28/izbicki13.pdf