You can't be in this business without being passionate about it. Well...I guess you can, but I think everyone on this site falls into the 'passionate' category. And with that comes the ability to pick things up on your own, which is in any case pretty much a necessity for this field, as many aspects of it change frequently.

One of the wonderful things about this field is how much is possible to do on your own, if you have a computer a decent internet connection.

In terms of Hecl itself, taken from (http://www.hecl.org/docs/j2me.html#javame_tutorial)

"I became interested in writing cell phone applications several years ago, after a rainy day high in the Italian Dolomites near Cortina d'Ampezzo - my old phone ended up in a mud puddle and died, leading me to purchase a new phone with J2ME (Java) capabilities. Writing applications in Java was okay, but I thought to myself that it would be an interesting experiment to try and create a scripting language that runs on top of the J2ME (now known as Java Micro Edition or Java ME) environment."