Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them • Hacker News Board

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#61

Post by schwurb » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 2:40 PM UTC

gdy wrote: post #16

usgroup wrote: post #5

I think there's a bit of a threshold with language learning. When you know a handful (or just theo necessary ones for your job), there is probably a bit of tendency to be religious about your "stack". When you know a few more than you need, then you're driven to pick between them for any given thing. Then, you start picking languages you don't know and learning them to do some thing you need done, and so on. I wrote…

"Here are the languages and DSLs that ended up in the mix: cron, Makefile, bash, sed, regex, jq query, python, R, sql, nginx conf" And also anyone who could replace you will have to know all these languages. Nice approach to job security.

> cron, Makefile, bash, sed

For a programmer with a minimal amount of linux experience, it likely takes a week to catch up to what the codebase is doing with these.

> regex

There are good tools to destructure regex.

> python sql jq query

I consider those as "given" or "learnable good enough in a week"

> nginx conf

Don't know this.

Overall, "knowing all these languages" seems overblown in the choice of words for me. Java, Python, Prolog and Clojure? Hell yeah that would take quite a developer to replace! But the above? There is 1 proper general-purpose language in there, the rest are well-known tools with great examples online.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#62

Post by deboflo » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 2:40 PM UTC

deboflo wrote: post #56

I learned many languages for years and I received a poor return on time investment. Later, I started learning AWS in depth and studying for certs. I now know way more than I previously did about networking, envelope encryption, messaging, infrastructure as code, pipelines, caching, CDN’s, networking protocols, load balancers, dns, and designing highly available and scalable systems. In summary, don’t forgo learning a…

Learn shell, a scripting language like Python, and a systems language like Java, C, Rust, Go, etc. I think that’s all you need to know as a backend or systems/DevOps Engineer.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#63

Post by Lowkeyloki » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

I spent a lot of time learning Haskell early in my career. I doubt I'll ever write an actual program in Haskell. I probably won't write so much as a single line of it that will ever see production. (Thank goodness. Haskell is far from perfect, despite its many zealots.) But learning Haskell has changed the way I write code in any language. It's helped me to write better, more testable, more readable, more maintainable, more bug-free Javascript. I wrote a lot of Clojure for a while a few years ago and being familiar with Haskell dropped the learning curve of Clojure down to almost nothing. I personally adore Lisps more than Haskell, but Haskell unlocked the world of functional programming for me. It also showed me the true power strong typing has at a time when the only strong typing I was aware of was the dismal type system of Java. (Like late 90s Java at that!)

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#64

Post by deboflo » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

deboflo wrote: post #62

deboflo wrote: post #56

I learned many languages for years and I received a poor return on time investment. Later, I started learning AWS in depth and studying for certs. I now know way more than I previously did about networking, envelope encryption, messaging, infrastructure as code, pipelines, caching, CDN’s, networking protocols, load balancers, dns, and designing highly available and scalable systems. In summary, don’t forgo learning a…

Learn shell, a scripting language like Python, and a systems language like Java, C, Rust, Go, etc. I think that’s all you need to know as a backend or systems/DevOps Engineer.

Throw in some basic HTML, css, and JavaScript as well.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#65

Post by DelightOne » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 2:43 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #35

gilbetron wrote: post #30

At this point I have almost 20 languages that I've used for at least two years, which is what I consider an decent bar for "knowing" a language. The problem I now have is that I don't know if I'll ever be able to master any language anymore. Mmmmaybe C, since I've used that fairly consistently, albeit on-and-off for 25 years. But whenever I get to an "if" or "for" or function declaration, I often have to look at an e…

I only know 5 or 6 but have the same problem. Dropping in semicolons into python. Forgetting brackets in JavaScript.

Too similar to keep them apart and too different to treat them the same. I don't see a solution apart from regular repetition, do you?

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#66

Post by gnclmorais » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

dajohnson89 wrote: post #34

gilbetron wrote: post #30

At this point I have almost 20 languages that I've used for at least two years, which is what I consider an decent bar for "knowing" a language. The problem I now have is that I don't know if I'll ever be able to master any language anymore. Mmmmaybe C, since I've used that fairly consistently, albeit on-and-off for 25 years. But whenever I get to an "if" or "for" or function declaration, I often have to look at an e…

I'm this way with foreign languages: Spanish and french. I know french very well, and learning/speaking Spanish is significantly harder because I'm always using french words by mistake. sure it'll get better with practice, but interlingual dyslexia is real.

Interesting, I feel like I have the opposite issue. Coming from Portuguese, learning Spanish was a breeze and I can usually surprise French speaking people with “hard” words in my basic French sentences — just because I reached out to a Portuguese word and “frenchyfied” it.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#67

Post by gilbetron » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

miqkt wrote: post #52

gilbetron wrote: post #30

At this point I have almost 20 languages that I've used for at least two years, which is what I consider an decent bar for "knowing" a language. The problem I now have is that I don't know if I'll ever be able to master any language anymore. Mmmmaybe C, since I've used that fairly consistently, albeit on-and-off for 25 years. But whenever I get to an "if" or "for" or function declaration, I often have to look at an e…

> I don't know if I'll ever be able to master any language anymore Even with just a handful of languages in my toolbox, I feel this way too. A mixture of unease and anxiety. In addition to syntactic variations, I find that the notion of writing idiomatic code in a given language amounts to more thinking overhead which eats into productivity. I'd need to be programming in the same language over a long period of time f…

I run into the idiomatic, or even "regional dialect", issue all the time. I've had many coworkers look at me like I'm stupid when I ask them how they like to implement a certain, basic algorithm. It's not that I don't know how to get it done, I'm just wondering how they like to structure their code, as I find it more important to match style than impose my own, generally speaking.

If I don't have to match styles, and can just write the code as I feel like it, I can work so much faster.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#68

Post by kjgkjhfkjf » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

I don't think it's worth studying many programming languages just for the sake of doing so. It's very rare that you get to choose the language to use on a project. If your goal is to be a great software engineer, your professional development time would likely be better spent working on domain knowledge and skills complementary to coding such as communication and leadership.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#69

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #39

Frankly I've never understood the desire to be a polyglot. The time spent learning new syntax and a new standard library could have been spent learning libraries, algorithms, data structures, etc, so I don't think it's the most productive way to improve yourself as a programmer. I'm more interested in learning a new language because it lets me do something I couldn't do before.

I know four useful languages well - C, C#, JavaScript, and Python. I know C++ as it existed shortly after the STL came out.

As far as knowing a modern framework and an ecosystem around the language to do something useful, I would take C off the list. I haven’t done anything useful with C since MFC/Win32.

If you want to do anything with the web, you have to know Javascript. C# is my favorite “serious” big project language but it’s way too heavyweight for simple scripting. For that Python is my go to language.

But, I’m not going to spend my limited free time learning any new technology that doesn’t directly help my career.

Re: Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

#70

Post by jamescostian » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

chronogram wrote: post #49

dajohnson89 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm this way with foreign languages: Spanish and french. I know french very well, and learning/speaking Spanish is significantly harder because I'm always using french words by mistake. sure it'll get better with practice, but interlingual dyslexia is real.

I’m not too familiar with the Southern European languages, but I am quite familiar with the Northern European languages. That is where I find the opposite of your difficulty happen, where all those languages look like a different flavour of German to me, so they were very easy to pick up, because I could just read Swedish slowly without ever looking at a textbook or dictionary, and over time I found myself quickly ab…

It's true that learning one Latin language (like French) makes it easier to understand another latin language (like Spanish), and the same is true of learning similar programming languages. But the point isn't that it's easy to approximate what is being said, it's that when you are speaking, all your prior knowledge confuses you.

For example, if you start speaking (not listening to) Frisian and Limburgs, you might find yourself throwing a few Swedish or German words in the mix.