Learning (very basic) Prolog indirectly caused me to learn to write parsers, AST transformations and symbolic derivation - I picked up a book on Prolog and was mystified by how simple the examples of symbolic derivation were in Prolog, a subject I was struggling with. So I sat down and figured out how to do an expression parser just so I could write a solver that mimicked how Prolog did it to understand how it worked. And in the process I learned a lot more.

It was transformational in a way my maths teacher was not...