Being confidently programming language agnostic
blog.bradfieldcs.com
Being confidently programming language agnostic
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Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic
#2I know formal education often gets a lot of criticism around HN, but I think the approach the article is talking about is heavily mirrored in most university computer science curriculums.
Universities tend to focus on paradigms and patterns, and typically force a student to learn at least 3 languages throughout their education (much more if they want to). Just in my undergrad I learned C, C++, C#, Objective C, Swift, assembler, Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Haskell. My personal experience is that university grads are much better at adapting to new languages than someone with 4 years experience in only a single language.
That's of course not to say you can't do the exact same sort of education without going to school (and probably in less time).
Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic
#3Discussion a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13291593
Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic
#4I have a sort of an issue with learning a lot of new languages. As much as I like to try them out, I like (and have) to learn things like big data processing or devops stuff and distributed systems and so on. And to be honest, when I get into the theory of those fields, the language does not mean so much. At the end I end up using what the targeted industry is searching for, and they do not need languages, they need solutions. And the language is rarely a solution.
In that set of things, a new language is somewhere lower in the priority list for learning new things. Sry.
Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic
#5An excellent article, well worth reading. As it points out, implementing the idea of learning a programming language for the sake of learning requires being highly selective in deciding which languages to learn. One language I would advise against learning is C++ - because, first, it may take too much time to learn to be worth the effort, and, second, the language itself is not all that interesting, and its standard library (especially STL), while does bring some novel ideas to the table, is so heavily affected by the particulars of the language itself, that maybe the D language would serve the same purpose better. Also, please do yourself a service and learn C# instead of Java. (This is not to create any doubt in the extreme usefulness of learning both C++ and/or Java for practical purposes.)
Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic
#6Good stuff.
Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic
#7I think nowadays people spend too much time learning new tools and too less time doing something really valuable using that tools. I wish I had only one language, so I can concentrate on more interesting things rather than learning yet another random set of operators and library function's names.
Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic
#8I used to arrogantly think I could be productive in any language given a week or so to adapt. I often used the phrase "a good dev is a good dev in any language." That belief was rather abruptly broken when I joined a project using C++/CX it was so far outside of my previous experience that I had a really bad time of it.
I happily picked up the actual language very quickly. It was the surrounding ecosystem of compilers, build tools, debugging tools, libraries, standard patterns and best practises that was too deep for me to become proficient in.
That said. Learning every language you can is definitely beneficial. Just don't expect to hit the same level of productivity in all of them.
Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic
#9I know formal education often gets a lot of criticism around HN, but I think the approach the article is talking about is heavily mirrored in most university computer science curriculums. Universities tend to focus on paradigms and patterns, and typically force a student to learn at least 3 languages throughout their education (much more if they want to). Just in my undergrad I learned C, C++, C#, Objective C, Swift,…
Agree so much. I had a very theoretical course and am often shocked at how reluctant my peers are to investigate a problem in a language they don't already know (normally just one or max two).
Also, if they need to quickly munge some text they'll have a dozen Java classes and several poms.
I think this has real practical consequences for decision making (not knowing alternatives etc).
Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic
#10I know formal education often gets a lot of criticism around HN, but I think the approach the article is talking about is heavily mirrored in most university computer science curriculums. Universities tend to focus on paradigms and patterns, and typically force a student to learn at least 3 languages throughout their education (much more if they want to). Just in my undergrad I learned C, C++, C#, Objective C, Swift,…
Agree so much. I had a very theoretical course and am often shocked at how reluctant my peers are to investigate a problem in a language they don't already know (normally just one or max two). Also, if they need to quickly munge some text they'll have a dozen Java classes and several poms. I think this has real practical consequences for decision making (not knowing alternatives etc).
Also agree. My programming languages course had me writing code in Racket, Julia, Erlang, Prolog, and Haskell, in addition to the languages that all students had to use for certain classes (C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, Assembly, and C#)