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

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

#291

Post by matt_kantor »

skrebbel wrote: post #267
klibertp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Structural typing wasn't around in mainstream languages before Go and TypeScript.

I assume you were taking klibertp up on this:

> try naming any "new" feature which was added to your favorite (EDIT: I meant mainstream - TIOBE top 10 or 20 - lang here!) language recently - and I'll show you that same feature implemented 10 or 20 years ago in another language(s).

This is a fun game and I'll answer for them on this one: OCaml (1996) has structural types.

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

#292

Post by bornon5 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #277
shstalwart wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I've come to basically the opposite conclusion and find case insensitivity to be counter intuitive. "Foo" and "foo" are not the same set of ascii characters; why should they map to the same thing?

"Dog" and "dog" are the same word, they are read the same, and pronounced the same. "D" and "d" are the same letter of the English alphabet, an alphabet with 26 characters not 52 characters. Why should they map to different things just because of some implementation limit behind the scenes in a computer? Why should the ASCII table be the defining characteristic, over and above the way humans have used English for dec…

As a fun counterpoint about case sensitivity in English, consider:

- The man spoke to God, saying he had made poor decisions.

- The man spoke to God, saying He had made poor decisions.

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

#293

Post by dahart »

blub wrote: post #161
ryanthedev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What, exactly, makes you think any of that stack is useless or unreasonable? Do you know what all the pieces do? I don’t have a clue from a single comment, but I have enough experience to know that all stacks came from a series of reasonable decisions, and more importantly, specific problems to solve.

So, TBH, my gut reaction to your comment is you might lack experience developing & shipping any large applications. That’s not an insult, and not a judgement; experience comes with time. Plus I don’t know your experience, I’m just letting you know what your comment leads me to assume. My only suggestion is to be a bit careful throwing around judgmental words like mess and useless and ‘not reasonable’ when you don’t know precisely what you’re talking about.

FWIW, this stack looks very normal even for a web-only application, and it looks simpler to me than the stacks & tech people use for shipping console games. Hell, I’ve written personal projects with tech stacks that have as many pieces.

If I’m off the mark about your experience level, you could make your case stronger by demonstrating that there’s a simpler cleaner alternative that solves the same problems, provides the same or better performance, build utility, maintainability, deployment, user experience, etc.. Do you have any suggestions?

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

#294

Post by skrebbel »

leadingthenet wrote: post #289
skrebbel wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean is not a mainstream language.

He didn't claim it would be, though. He just said, for every feature implemented in a top20 lang, you can already find it implemented somewhere else, 10-20 years ago.

That holds for every mainstream X. It makes the challenge ridiculous.

Here's a challenge: come up with something that people generally think is fundamentally new. Given enough HN commenters, someone will present an example of how something super similar to that thing was already there 20-30 years prior.

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

#295

Post by leshow »

Const-me wrote: post #280
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…

> Going from Java to C# you will learn less than going from javascript to ocaml or Java to Haskell. Depends on how you'll use C#. If you'll write Java-style OOP, you'll indeed learn very little. But C# offers much more than Java: generics, FP, LINQ, async-await, dynamic, native interop, unsafe and pointer arithmetic..

I disagree, regardless of 'how you use' c# going from Java to Haskell will be a paradigm change whereas going to c# is an incremental change

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

#296

Post by leshow »

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 ?

The sibling comment did a great job pointing these out. I agree with most of the points.

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

#297

Post by throwaway34241 »

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…

I think this is true for just learning the language alone. But for the type of productivity the grandparent post is talking about the language ecosystem can be a bigger challenge, at least for me.

It wasn't in academia, but I spent a while working on one of the major native front end platforms almost exclusively and had the opportunity to get very familiar with it. And by 'familiar' I don't mean just knowing where to look things up, I mean knowing many of the exact APIs by heart, and having a wide variety of things I could just type in (without much looking things up) even if it involved working with images, network requests, JSON, file IO, string processing, dates/scheduling, collections, serialization, menus, windows, controls, input, drawing, sound, etc.

Another big thing was when there are multiple ways do the same thing, having done it both ways and having direct experience of why one choice will likely be more effective in general or for a particular project. This can apply to choosing libraries/frameworks or app architectural decisions.

I noticed I missed this level of familiarity quite a lot when I switched to a different ecosystem later. Maybe this is worse for native UI development because of the large API surfaces. But I found needing to consult the documentation again to be a lot slower.

Having had that experience has kind of made me wonder about full-stack vs specialization, and optimal-language-for-the job vs standardizing (although of course some languages are totally inappropriate for some jobs). At least in my own experience I found sticking with the same language for a while to have continuing productivity benefits well beyond the 1 week/month period.

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

#298

Post by throwaway34241 »

throwaway34241 wrote: post #297
klibertp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is true for just learning the language alone. But for the type of productivity the grandparent post is talking about the language ecosystem can be a bigger challenge, at least for me. It wasn't in academia, but I spent a while working on one of the major native front end platforms almost exclusively and had the opportunity to get very familiar with it. And by 'familiar' I don't mean just knowing where to…

And for a specific example of the sort of ecosystem stuff I am talking about, to save/load some local data on iOS you have some API options:

Core Data

SQLite

NSArchiver

NSKeyedArchiver

NSUserDefaults

JSON

Property lists

Protocol buffers

stdio

NSData

memory-mapped files

Realm

This is without getting into anything too obscure. This list is probably also out of date.

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

#299

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jodrellblank wrote: post #246
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall exactly how many handrolled loops I've messed up in the last 10 years, but the number is either 1 or 2. Could I mess up one or two map/filter/reduces in 10 years? Is it impossible to mess them up? What about the cases they don't cover, so you use your own recursion?

OK you can write a handrolled loop almost perfectly. /Why/ are you writing ten years worth of loops - something a computer can do for you?

Can it? I'm working on embedded systems, in C++, with C++11-or-earlier compilers. Sometimes I need control of the exact order things happen in. Sometimes I need an action to occur either zero or one times, on the first available entry. Always I need to write code that my coworkers can read.

How much of that can a C++11 compiler do for me?

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

#300

Post by macintux »

byebyetech wrote: post #250
macintux wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first book led me to discover Erlang, which literally changed my life. Great resource.

Could you please elaborate on how it changed your life? I am interested in learning Elixir and wondering if you can give some words of encouragement, assuming it changed your life positively :)

Falling in love with Erlang led me to create a Twitter account to share information about it, which helped me find and land a job with Basho, which was by far my favorite job, even if the company ended badly.

So, that part is difficult to replicate.

Setting that aside, Erlang finally helped me understand what functional programming is about (I'd tried and failed to grasp Lisp on a few occasions), taught me the value of immutability and asynchronous message passing, really opened my eyes to the fact that there's a vast world outside the tired Algol family tree.

Sadly, pattern matching and immutability have made it very hard for me to enjoy programming in other languages. Most of my development work after that has been in Python, which is not only the least exciting language I've used in a very long time, but also lacks most of what I came to appreciate about Erlang.

Erlang's constraints (primarily immutability in this context) makes it so much easier to reason about and troubleshoot code.

It's also a good language for helping get opportunities to talk at conferences. People keep hearing about it without knowing much about it, so those talks tend to be well-attended.

Elixir is a perfectly acceptable language, although the syntax and other design choices turn me off, personally. Erlang is a very concise language and helps me think in Erlang; anything that looks like Python/Ruby/C/Java/etc just feels wrong now.

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