41–50 of 315 posts
I remember finishing college in the late 90s and coming across Emacs (actually, XEmacs back then) for the first time. What a weird editor, how could anyone even want use this voluntarily? Until some coworkers at the place I worked back then showed me some tricks. The touch of enlightenment hasn't stopped ever since and probably never will.
Sadly, Clojure has left me in a position where Python + Django in my day work disgusts me with its mutability and unnecessary OO semantics, but I don't have much choices in my area. Ignorance can be a bliss sometimes!
My wow moment was when I quit trying to do everything in the language I was comfortable with (PHP) and became a language agnostic engineer. Since then (2 years ago) now I can write in 3 programming language, nobody can realize that I am new at these languages and I know that I can pick a new language up now in a very short time. I had to study so much in these last 2 years but since I love engineering it was funny ra…
Django faster than raw PHP or Phalcon. I find that hard to believe. Are we talking PHP7?
Django compared to Laravel (which is now probably the most popular PHP framework) is orders of magnitude faster. This is what I meant with Django being faster that PHP (this statement compares a framework with a programming language - not fair)
Clojure, or maybe all these related Rich Hickey talks transformed my attitude towards systems programming. Before that, the Unix philosophy. But perhaps I can't say that the Unix philosophy changed my career because I adopted it very early in my programming and way before any career established. Sadly, Clojure has left me in a position where Python + Django in my day work disgusts me with its mutability and unnecessa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah defo, learning my second language was big step in my development
for the last 7 years i've been a php developer and i'm currently in the process of learning my second language, #c. it's good to hear that someone else has been through this process before me and said it was such a big step! thanks for giving me some more motivation!
Languages with fundamentally different paradigms will still be a little tricky - Haskell, Scala, Stan, R etc don't bear a lot of resemblance to PHP.
Common Lisp and Haskell turned me into a grumpy, unemployable mess. Terrible ROI.
I went 180 and now I'm starting to appreciate (and making money with) Go.
First it was a weekend project, then a full project at work, now there is a full team working on it and my title has changed to "Data analyst".
All in 6 months.
Another wow moment was Perl, and its just three data types.
Then lisp.
Currently I think that the most mind changing languages for me were SQL, and C++. I don't know why, I just love Postgres, and I love the C++ speed.
However for the last 15 years I've been commercially programming in C, C++, Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, Perl, Delphi, PHP, SQL.
What I like is different: I like Python, Postgres, SQL, Java, and I'm learning currently is the newest C++, and a little bit of Rust.
I'm not sure why I still have problems with understanding Haskell.
However when I'm looking for a remote job now, all that doesn't matter. I get some strange interviews with 10 minute algorithm tasks (if you don't remember the implementation of this task, which you have never seen before, you have no chance to write it). Or even recruiters not understanding the answers to technical questions they ask.
And most of the job offers I get require 10 years of writing in one language, so I'm wondering if I did good learning all those different things.