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

thorstenball.com

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

#91
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When exactly are we supposed to be learning all these languages? Some argue that as a professional, you should be spending time outside of work learning to improve your career. You can't expect your employer to give you time to learn. I find it can be difficult though, especially when you want to spend your time outside of work on other things like family and hobbies.

I didn’t say you shouldn’t spend personal time on those things but you should expect to be compensated one way or another for it. It’s interesting how people in IT separate their skills from their compensation. If my lawyer or doctor is working weekends I guarantee one way or another they are making damn sure they’re getting compensated for it.

Most states require between 20 and 50 hours of continuing education for MDs per year. (https://www.boardvitals.com/blog/cme-requirements-by-state/)

Most states seem to require between 8 and 15 hours of CLE per year. (https://www.lawline.com/cle-requirements)

You'll find that with most actual "professions".

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

#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 a confidence with languages that I don't think I've seen any language features in any other language that has ever surprised me or that I felt like I couldn't learn. Haskell and it's language extensions will expose you to many many different ideas. It helped me learn Rust, I feel like I can read ocaml, any other functional language doesn't feel like a stretch to read, etc

So, don't just learn many languages. My advice would be to pick languages across paradigms and learn them. Don't waste your time learning 5 object oriented languages.

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

#93

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…

Perhaps try learning sufficiently different languages? For me it's hard to make cross-language mistakes except within the {} groups: C, {all kinds of assembly}, {C++, Java, C#}, {Python, Ruby}, {Haskell, OCaml}, Prolog, {VHDL, Verilog}

{CL, Scheme, Clojure}, {all kinds of shell scripting, maybe Perl}

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spanish and Portuguese seem to be unusually close. Studying one helps me with the other. Portuguese and Japanese on the other hand...

The OP wasn’t talking about Japanese. They were talking about European languages- many of which share a common heritage

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

#95
post #41

JavaScript is one of the must learn programming languages. Server side code, client-side web app code, npm links it all together... Well it seems cliche' but also true...

It never should have escaped the browser. It's brought the suck to everything now...

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

#96

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.

At work we use C#, Java, C++, Python, BASH, powershell, Javascript, PERL, etc...

If you only want to work on C#, you're limiting your mobility here.

Personally, I never get bored because there's so many interesting projects in different languages.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When exactly are we supposed to be learning all these languages? Some argue that as a professional, you should be spending time outside of work learning to improve your career. You can't expect your employer to give you time to learn. I find it can be difficult though, especially when you want to spend your time outside of work on other things like family and hobbies.

I absolutely expect my employer to give me paid time to learn, and only work for those that do.

I don't. Oh, I'll spend some down time learning rather than spending all of it here, but I don't expect formal training, especially if I am asked to jump in to some project quickly. In fact, most formal training I have been exposed to outside of school has been horrible and useless; I actively avoid them.

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

#98

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 thought I was the only one. Also class and method names : is it array.length(), array.len(), array.Length, array.size(), len(array), Len(array).

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

#99

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.

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.

Going from native Portuguese, then French, and only then Spanish (yep, I've gone to a crazy school), I got much of the problem the GP was talking about. I don't think I've ever spoken so much French as the time when I was leaning Spanish.

There's something with those two languages in that they interfere badly.

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

#100

So I fully agree here because techniques from one language often lead to much better technique in a language of a different paradigm. For instance, I now use many of the functional techniques I’ve learned in JavaScript to write less, easier to read code instead of more loc of imperative code. I’ve also worked at a company that had many functional patterns implemented in php, and frankly made the language quite decent…

> In terms of the time issue, I spend about 15 minutes a day just before bedtime learning new languages. I probably manage to do this 4 days out of every 7.

Do you find this actually works? Personally I've read entire books for a language and then gone to write some code in it and realized I knew almost nothing. The only way I've found to learn a language is by writing it.

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