31–40 of 52 posts
I kinda went from there. I'm a shitty programmer so it was awful at first but I learned a lot about both Python and programming from Steve and Chris.
Now I'm a less shitty programmer. :)
I was in my university's co-op program, but didn't apply for any jobs. A couple of weeks after the interview period ended, a representative from the school's co-op program called me and said they had a company that was desperate for a co-op, didn't find any who were qualified during the interview process, and my résumé was the only one they could find that listed experience with C. I took the job. Embedded systems, p…
Java: had to learn it for school.
Python: got tired of Java's verbosity, friend recommended it.
Ocaml: job at a quant hedge fund.
Lisp/Clojure: SICP.
C++: Worked at Google for 6 months-- not long enough to join the set of 23 people in the world who actually understand it.
Scala: wanted to use a better language in a Java shop that insisted on static typing.
Haskell: studied it a bit on my own. Haven't used it for anything big, though.
C: Coursera's GPU programming course. Zed Shaw's "Learn C the Hard Way". Wouldn't say I really "know" C but I understand the principles.
Assembly: Programming from the Ground Up. Again, wouldn't say I really "know" it but I grok the principles.
That's when I discovered Python (NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, IPython). As for the actual learning process, these three things helped me the most:
1. http://www.pythonchallenge.com/
3. the emergence of Stack Overflow. I asked and answered a bunch of questions there.
I wrote more about my reasoning here in an old post (2010): http://stevetjoa.com/305/
I was in my university's co-op program, but didn't apply for any jobs. A couple of weeks after the interview period ended, a representative from the school's co-op program called me and said they had a company that was desperate for a co-op, didn't find any who were qualified during the interview process, and my résumé was the only one they could find that listed experience with C. I took the job. Embedded systems, p…
Wow, really? I've been biding my time in a shitty marketing job because I've been trying to master all of these high level languages after assuming that that's what employers are looking for. I taught myself C, C++, and PHP growing up, but assumed that those were out of style. My college adviser (part-time grad school) even INSISTED that I learn Java because I wouldn't get anywhere without it.
I'm beginning to think my most marketable language is still going to end up being PHP, or VB/C#.
I learned VBA because excel is only useful for simple adhoc data manipulations without it. I then learned R because excel-based forecasting was a nightmare. I then learned Clojure because R was a terrible general purpose language. I then learned Ruby because the JVM startup time was really annoying for simple scripts and command line utilities. I then started to learn Rust because Ruby was slow and I was getting sick…
C++,Java,C#,VB - School. I have yet to be able to do anything useful or fun in any of these.
C in college and previous job doing kernel level programming.
Python in college to develop physics simulations. Fell in love with it and is one of my favorite languages today.
C++ due to my current job. I used it as C with generics for the past year, but am slowly learning the deeper features of the language. The more I learn, the more I hate it though :).
Go because I wanted to. Developed a simple proxy server to get an idea about the various language features. Actually, writing a proxy is a sweet way to quickly get a sense of many diverse features of a language. I love the documentation and focus on 'software engineering'.
Clojure because I wanted to. I am trying it out in the context of web.
Java in school but I haven't used it in about 2 years.