Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thorstenball.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 319 posts

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

#161

Post by blub »

ryanthedev wrote: post #109
dxbydt wrote: post #105

Learn more ? I'm actively trying to unlearn a bunch of languages at this point! ofcourse, when I was a wageslave in the bay area, its nice to know python, java, javascript, scala etc. - got me jobs every 2-3 years & put food on table. now that i'm in academia, its completely upside down. literally everybody is way more productive than me in just about any task. The other day I as supposed to program a poisson clock,…

I work for an airline. I known about constraints. If I knew only one language, I never would be at the level I am. Here is the tech stack I deal with daily. VB6 Kix scripts Powershell .net 3.5 Winforms WPF .net 4+ .net core .net asp Java JavaScript React Angular C++ Golang. If programming is a job and not your craft, it will be harder for you. You just have to practice more.

> VB6 Kix scripts Powershell .net 3.5 Winforms WPF .net 4+ .net core .net asp Java JavaScript React Angular C++ Golang

That just sounds like some mess that one is forced to deal with, not reasonable software engineering. I mean yes, some jobs will drown one in useless stuff. Doesn't mean that learning the useless stuff is a virtue now.

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

#162

Post by blub »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #115
dxbydt wrote: post #105

Learn more ? I'm actively trying to unlearn a bunch of languages at this point! ofcourse, when I was a wageslave in the bay area, its nice to know python, java, javascript, scala etc. - got me jobs every 2-3 years & put food on table. now that i'm in academia, its completely upside down. literally everybody is way more productive than me in just about any task. The other day I as supposed to program a poisson clock,…

I'm not familiar with the author, but I didn't take the article strictly from the perspective of the labor market. There are people who program as a hobby, for example. For those who are interested, it can be enlightening to see how different language designs lend themselves to different tasks.

And it can be even more interesting to learn about operating systems, networking, algorithms, etc, etc.

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

#163

Post by blub »

aphextron wrote: post #29

My suggestion is Objective-C. It's just so weird to anyone who's never coded in it, that it will force you out of your comfort zone into new ways of thinking. The NS framework is probably the most well designed stdlib of any language ever, and the whole thing is inspired directly from Smalltalk. Protocol Oriented Programming [0] was also a real revelation for me, and I still apply those concepts anywhere I can. It's…

Obj-C will always be a dear example to me, because after people praised it so much on HN in contrast with C++, Java I expected it to be something at least a little bit special. When I actually had the chance to use it, I found a mediocre and pretty error-prone language. And then the cherry on top, Apple unceremoniously flushed it down the drain...

This taught me to take any programming language recommendations from HN with a huge quantity of salt and also mostly ignore Kay-style OO purists.

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

#164

Post by macando »

If you are entrepreneurial and already know one functional and one strongly typed OO language, the following will significantly improve your career more than learning another programming language. Learning to:

- sell.

- design.

- write better.

- tell a good story.

- get along with people.

- do proper SEO.

- speak another natural language.

- model and query data.

- understand ML/AI.

This is coming from somebody who though himself 10+ programming languages.

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

#165

Post by rb808 »

klibertp wrote: post #126
dxbydt wrote: post #105

Learn more ? I'm actively trying to unlearn a bunch of languages at this point! ofcourse, when I was a wageslave in the bay area, its nice to know python, java, javascript, scala etc. - got me jobs every 2-3 years & put food on table. now that i'm in academia, its completely upside down. literally everybody is way more productive than me in just about any task. The other day I as supposed to program a poisson clock,…

It's perfectly possible to know several languages in-depth. It just takes a lot of time and effort. Moreover, it gets easier with time and practice. Knowing N languages makes learning N+1 language just a bit easier. For me the turning point was around N == 10, since when learning a new language - and yes, in-depth, including idioms, stdlib, some external libraries, maybe some framework (if needed), and also some fact…

Define know though. A C++/Java programmer can quickly write some Python code but isn't Pythonic. To me being able to write a program in a language doesn't mean you can write some code in it, you also have to know the paradigm its supposed to be used, as well as the layout styles, build tools, commonly used libraries etc etc. Even learning a new library often takes months alone.

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

#166

Post by p1esk »

plinkplonk wrote: post #112
dxbydt wrote: post #105

Learn more ? I'm actively trying to unlearn a bunch of languages at this point! ofcourse, when I was a wageslave in the bay area, its nice to know python, java, javascript, scala etc. - got me jobs every 2-3 years & put food on table. now that i'm in academia, its completely upside down. literally everybody is way more productive than me in just about any task. The other day I as supposed to program a poisson clock,…

" its because they know exactly 1 language ," which language is this? I'm guessing Python.

Probably Matlab

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

#167

Post by dvlsg »

mokus wrote: post #117
dxbydt wrote: post #105

Learn more ? I'm actively trying to unlearn a bunch of languages at this point! ofcourse, when I was a wageslave in the bay area, its nice to know python, java, javascript, scala etc. - got me jobs every 2-3 years & put food on table. now that i'm in academia, its completely upside down. literally everybody is way more productive than me in just about any task. The other day I as supposed to program a poisson clock,…

Not sure know how far you may be into your career but as one who’s had a couple decades, it’s definitely possible to have both. I have been able to learn two very different languages (C and Haskell) to that level of comfort and am feeling nearly there in Rust. At the same time, I feel reasonably comfortable picking up a project in any of about 20 others with frequent reference to standard lib docs. With only my own e…

I agree. If most of your experience is with a popular OO language, consider learning a lisp. Learn an ML. Try elixir/erlang to get a feel for how different programming for the BEAM can be.

I suppose you don't _have_ to use different languages to learn new concepts, but it certainly helps in some cases. For example, learning about currying is going to be much more natural in F# than it would be in C#.

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

#168

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

sus_007 wrote: post #120
leshow wrote: post #92

I couldn't agree more, but if I could make a recommendation. If you already know a mainstream OO language, you won't get much benefit out of learning another in the same arena. Going from Java to C# you will learn less than going from javascript to ocaml or Java to Haskell. The best thing (for my own learning) I ever decided to do was learn Haskell. I have never been paid to write code in Haskell but it gave me such…

Out of curiosity, if you were to point out the focal languages on each paradigm, what would they be ?

Classic OOP: Smalltalk

Metaprogramming / what OOP could have been / interesting error handling: Common Lisp

Static Types/FP: Haskell (or Ocaml)

Logic Programming: Prolog

Untyped FP: Clojure (or Scheme)

Actor Model: Erlang (or Elixir)

CSP: Clojure w/ core.async (or Go)

GUI Development: Lazarus (or Delphi)

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

#169

Post by pjmlp »

scarface74 wrote: post #139
pjmlp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends very much on what that CRUD app is doing. Knowing algorithms and data structures pretty well, is the difference between an update button taking a couple of minutes, or milliseconds.

And I would even say that’s not true most of the time. Why is the update button slow? - Is your customer in Asia and your servers are in us-east-1? Do we need a multi master database one in each region? Can we make even that faster by doing an eventually consistent write? - do we really need a synchronous update process or can we use queues to make it more consistent? - is our web server slow? Should we scale horizon…

Answer 5. Update implemented as O(n!) for the input dataset graph because the coder didn't knew any better.

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

#170

Post by UlisesAC4 »

ozim wrote: post #116
ryanthedev wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to use a jar in a .net program. Do you know how much of a pain in the ass that was?

That is very nasty joke sir.

Sometimes our daily job tasks are nastier jokes than we would like to admit.
Post reply on HN