I've been programming for 20+ years, and recently moved over to Python. Sure, I could code on day one and figure out how to get programs working pretty easily. But the nuances with it are still things I need to work on a lot. I still don't program Pythonicly, I program like a C programmer writing Python. In fact, I probably program in all languages like I would a C programmer, and that's not good enough, in my opinion.
I have fallen in love with Python because it's so damn easy to get productive, and I really want to be a great Python programmer. That takes a lot more time than the OP suggests, and requires you to immerse yourself in the patterns of the language and in the community, in my opinion. Not just dabble a bit and then check a box saying "I'm a polyglot!"
Those shortened links take you to amazon (not affiliated in any way, FYI, just though the length of the URLs was obnoxious)
Those are the definitive python programming books I came up with anyway.
While we are at, I have to say once I learned to really code Pythonically I find that I can apply the PEP8 standards to almost any language. Admittedly, I, like John Siracusa, am a top level language debutante and don't live in C or C++ production code (I sometimes use objc but swift is...easier :). I remember learning C, and thanks to arduino I certainly using some varient of C/c++ there more heavily, but my coding style follows more or less the pythonic standard (with PEP8 being the backbone of that).
It takes a while to get used to the idiomatic constructs of a language. Luckily it's much easier than with natural languages.
My first Ruby programs were very Java like. I doubt that my first Java programs were C like, if you use classes and methods it just can't be. No problem with using Python and Ruby together. They are maybe like German and English, close but clearly distinguishable. And Javascript, Perl, PHP, Elixir... too long to write about.
A consequence of multilingualism is that one starts noticing the differences in the implementation of the same features in different languages. Some are smooth, others are frustratingly hard to use or to remember. A quick test on a trivial nuisance, you must not Google it: in Python it's array.join(",") or ",".join(array)? And "1,2,3".split(",") or ",".split("1,2,3")? I remember only that "," goes to the opposite ends in the two expressions and I can't understand why that should be good.
What I love about Python is that it's so similar to how I've written pseudocode over the years. So, I often do quick prototypes of ideas in it, even if the final product isn't in Python.
Like you, I'm basically a C programmer at heart. But, to get efficient at some of the Maple code I had to write for my graduate work, I learnt a number of their functional tools so I now think quite a bit about using some of those as part of my toolset. I'm still largely a C-style programmer, though.
Working with the SymPy project helped me in my Python style.
Additionally, if you really want to get productive, you'll also need to get to know which libraries/frameworks to use, and how to use them (idiomatically). This is the most time-consuming tasks, I think.
I 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).
Yes! My university CS program focused on teaching you to think about computation, with the particular language you'd express your thoughts in as an interchangeable detail.
Scheme for beginners, Python for web scraping and data munging, C for concurrent network and systems programming, and some small exposure to Java, Haskell, Standard ML, awk, yacc/lex, C++, and your mobile environment of choice depending on which classes you took.
Many were upset by this "very theoretical" approach, as they'd prefer to have immediately employable skills in JS-framework-of-the-week. Instead they were taught how to think independently of a particular language, and to get comfortable with learning new ones.
From a programming craft perspective, it was a little disappointing that we were never focused on advanced language features or idiomatic code, but I felt I had a solid enough base to self-teach that sort of thing.
I agree that's what they aim for, but in my experience far too many CS grads (especially from non-top universities) have absolutely no understanding of the core paradigms. Instead, they've basically memorized "this is how I make a linked list in Java." Ask them to do the same exact task in another language and they're totally stumped.
The perfect example of this approach is Concepts, Models, and Techniques of Computer Programming. It covers a wide range of paradigms [1] using Oz/Mozart and it also shows examples using many famous languages.
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).
> Universities tend to focus on paradigms and patterns...
> ...That's of course not to say you can't do the exact same sort of education without going to school...
I think the personal motivation that someone brings has a lot to do with how they fare short term and long term in this regard. Yes, a good University program will teach you the concepts and underlying theory expressed by language implementations; coming out of such a program you will absolutely have the jump on someone that jumped into JavaScript programming informally. You will adapt more quickly to other technologies faster, too, as you have the essentials to make that shift whereas the JS guy may not.
Having said that, if you attended and graduated college because it was something that you were "suppose to do" or because it would get you a good job and computer science was just a way to a good job after college (with no particular interest in the field otherwise)... over time the more personally interested developer that learned JS informally will likely catch up with you and overtake you.
My formal education is in music composition. However, I was programming assembly on the old 8bit machines when I was a kid. 20 years on as a technology professional, I devote large amounts of time to learning concepts and theory that aren't strictly necessary for me to program something that works well enough for my customers. I learn these things because I'm genuinely interested in the underpinnings of what I do and because I want to perfect my professional skills... not for an employer, but for my own edification: I care about what I produce because it's me producing it. There are many of my friends that did get formal education in computer science and I've surpassed them in both quality of output and overall understanding. (BTW... don't get me wrong, I have colleagues that have formal education in computer science AND the same sort of professional dedication I have... a good number of them far exceed my knowledge and understanding and I very much look up to them. Still, I'm glad I don't have to feel ashamed standing by their side professionally either).
I think the top-10 universities do it right and the rest don't. (This is a bit of an exaggeration but you most likely know what I mean).
Most of my classmates don't usually "learn" a language. They do an assignment by copying, hammering at the computer, or just asking for help. The basis of how university is set up is antithetical to the learning and exploration of new programming languages. This is based on one simple thing that most universities do and is very easy to fix.
Don't mandate a programming language for you assignments
If this one thing was done, we'd probably instantly see a much higher failure rate and a much hire quality of turnout. If early on in the curriculum students got a tour of every one of the big name languages and got to just choose the best tool for the job for the rest of their time at university there'd be a much closer approximation to how things (at least for me) work.
If one of your projects is something like "scrape a webpage for X data" you wouldn't want to write that in a bash script (which I've been made to do [0]) I'd want to do that in Python with BS4. Or if your project is to write a parallel dot product function you wouldn't want to write that in C (which I've been made to do [1]). I'd want to write that in Julia.
Even in my class that I took for exploring programming languages we were forced to use C++. We were writing an interpreter using C++ which I'd rather have done in some Lisp-like languages.
Unfortunatly I've not been able to make the design decition to play with other language (in school) to see how they will better impact the development of these applications. I've not had to prototype stuff to see what language it will work best in (in school). These are decitions made for me.
I've found that this isn't how things work, at least for me, and I'm the one who is told "Do X" and I pick a way to do it. Whether it's by setting up a spreadsheet it a macro in it that generates the data or writing some real code. I get to choose the most elegant solution and I suffer the consequences then I didn't choose the most elegant solution since I have to my software when it breaks 2 years down the line.
>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.
These benefits seem dubious to me in the long term unless you plan to work on compilers and languages which is certainly a noble goal and is very much a hot area right now. Picking up brainfuck in a short period of time is not really noteworthy IMO. I am also struggling to come up with a way to present this to other people without coming off as an annoying know-it-all. Do we want to value the ability to sprint or the ability to finish a marathon?
Plus, your memory will deteriorate over time without constant practice. Am I really going to commit time to reviewing all languages I choose to learn every year or so? The article seems like a challenge-to-take more than career advice.
If someone doesn't immediately want to work with languages, I would rather teach them what might be analogous to the lay of the land in our industry:
- What tools do you use to make a desktop application on Windows/Linux/Mac?
- How do the different browsers (Edge/Chrome/Firefox) implement HTML/CSS/JS? Can you make a consistent behaving application for all of them? And why should you run far, far away from any company asking you to support IE8 in 2017?
- How would you make a cross-platform library for Windows/Linux/Mac?
- How would you make a mobile application?
- What are the most popular IDE options available?
- What are the different database options available?
The difference in opinion is exactly teaching more engineering vs. teaching more science, but also learning about the ecosystem that drives language choice and development. This knowledge contributes as much to "knowing the right tool to solve the problem" ability as diverse language knowledge.
I just wish those universities actually produced programmers who understand the low level mechanics of how computers work. I.e. Why your program runs 100x slower if you're not careful about cache misses, pretty basic stuff like that. Moore's law is over, it's time to start caring about performance again.
Yes, when I graduated in the 90's, we had Pascal, C++, C, Prolog, Caml Light, Java, PL/SQL, Assembly (x86 and MIPS), Tarski's World language, Lisp, Algol, PL/I.
Those like myself doing compiler related classes got to additionally explore Forth, Oberon, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Modula-2, Modula-3, Eiffel, Ada, Concurrent C, Objective-C, *Lisp, Sather, C+@ [1] among a few others I cannot remember now.
As Wirth puts it, it is all about algorithms and data structures, in an abstract way.
Mine was a little less about patterns in some cases (2 year school though) and you got to take plenty of different programming classes from Web, to C to C++, Scripting Languages, C#, Java, and others. After it all I somewhat try my best to be language agnostic, with sane reasoning, I will raise my concerns if I know the faults of a language. It would be silly to just code in any language asked to and never raise concerns or offer alternatives if they fit your workflow better.
I agree: in my French school we had to learn assembly language, C, Prolog and Lisp.
Clearly Prolog and Lisp were taught to us for the different paradigm they introduce not because they expected us to use Prolog and Lisp in our jobs..
I 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.
C++ is a special beast though. It's famously complex.
What gets my goat is the idea that some recruiters have that I - as someone with mostly C# experience - would be completely useless in a Java environment.
Java and C# are so similar it's barely worth noticing. There'd be different IDEs and libraries in play - and sure, a lot of googling to remind myself of stuff in the first week. But that pales into the comparison to the amount of time I'll likely spend learning the business domain, or how the legacy code base works. That's the stuff that's truly important.
I agree. It's not always the language which makes it tough to integrate yourself into a project, sometimes it's all the frameworks, libraries, build tools, and general makeup of the project itself.
I worked for a company a few years back doing ASP.NET (my experience is mostly Linux based tech, but you can pick up a language, right?). The language was fine, the design patterns used all quite standard, but the project had an array of frameworks and libraries which made maintaining it painstaking.
> 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.
I felt the same way trying to learn Haskell. The language itself isn't that hard to learn, but just try and go read some code for one of the large open source hs code bases (like Yesod, etc.) :)
I also remember being put on a C++ project after being away from the language for years (C++ 11 was... different from the C++ I used back in the early 2000s). I was completely lost for a while :O
On the other hand, some languages are easy to pick up quickly (like Go), and some just 'click' for some people (as Clojure did for me).
The C++ template system alone makes it very difficult. Plus, many people have a habit of writing a mess of interconnected classes that become very difficult to pull apart to understand what's happening.
During my Master's (and my Ph.D.) I was using a finite element approach developed by a former Ph.D. of my supervisor(s). So, I asked for the code. I got back a mess of C++ and it was dependent on a linear algebra C++ library that wasn't around in the same form. I spent some time trying to reason out what he was trying to do, gave up and wrote my own in Fortran in about as much time as I spent trying to understand his.
> 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.
Yes, those take a while. It's even harder if the new language is outside of paradigms you are familiar with. Eg Prolog or Haskell would be that for most people.
I’ve started coded C++/CX without noticeable degradation in productivity.
But when I need to code for e.g. linux, because of those tools and practices you’ve mentioned my productivity was much worse compared to using Visual Studio on Windows, even when using same standard C++.
I 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.
While using fewer, better languages for more is fantastic, I doubt you really want a single language.
Try replacing shell, Structured Query Language, and C with the same language. I won't say that it can't be done, but I think you'll lose a lot if you succeed.
I'm with you. A standard set of languages/tools would be great, so you don't have to pay a cognitive overhead cost every time before you dive in. It's fatiguing. It adds up. I much more enjoy the act of programming than learning a new tool or language....and then getting on with the real work.
Pipe dream, it would seem, but: I feel like the energy spent picking up new things could be used so much better going deeper and building more with established tools--tools hardened by collective reuse.
After you have some experience with, say, 3 to 5 different languages, you can learn new ones very quickly (hours, days) with little effort because you know almost all of the core concepts (OOP, FP, mutability, generics, ...). There's no point in learning "all of the languages" for its own sake. Just learn a bunch of different ones to learn different ideas and programming styles.
What takes more time is the standard library, common libraries, tools. A good example of that is iOS development in Swift. Learning the language is almost negligible compared to learning all of the technologies and tools. But coming from Android, I think I'm close to about 50 % of full productivity after two weeks.
I never understood why there's so much focus on the "x years experience in y" in the industry. A solid developer should be able to become fluent in any language and technology within a month or two.
"I never understood why there's so much focus on the "x years experience in y" in the industry. A solid developer should be able to become fluent in any language and technology within a month or two."
I don't think any developer can become fluent at a new language in 1-2 months. I have seen so much terrible code over the years the compiles and appears to run just fine but with massive performance issues, poor design, unreadable, security issues, memory leaks, etc. etc.
I see learning the syntax of a language to be something like 0-5% of the effort of mastering a language, knowing how to properly use a language really does take years. Although I agree that # of years of experience is not a perfect metric.
I'm glad that the trend is slowly going towards hiring generally smart people instead of a "PHP/Rails/Python programmer". I'd say, better hire people that can easily adapt something new if needed rather than saying "I am a PHP programmer, I don't want to do this new project in Ruby." (I met my good share of people in previous companies thinking in that way to the extend that they would quit if asked to write in something else than what they were hired for)
In my current company they were looking for a Go programmer. I never wrote a single line Go before, yet they hired me and now I am writing Go. Then we had a deficit in the iOS team, so I learned Swift and now work on our app.
I 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.
A few recommendations on this, since at where I work a talk is organized on this very topic today.
1. A great book that covers multiple paradigms of programming is Roy and Haridi's "Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/concepts-techniques-and-model... . This stands hand in hand with the better known SICP.
2. Folks in the CS and programming world seem to ignore bleeding edge work being done in the arts space. To get a broader view of languages than "characters that go into a plain text file", expose yourself to the live-ness of the following -
2.ø Smalltalk - one of the first fully available language and runtime that is still usable today.
2.a Max/MSP/Jitter - by David Zicrelli and Millet Pickette's - Visual data flow programming language with decades of dominance in the Computer Music scene.
2.b SuperCollider - for architecture lessons as well as another multi-paradigm language.
2.c Impromptu - a Scheme based live coding environment for music and visuals by Andrew Sorenson. Normal REPLs will bow in front of most "live coding" languages used for music.
2.d Ixilang by Thor Magnusson - another live coding language, where the language is in a sense inseparable from its run time environment. The current running behaviour of a textual program could also depend on how the program evolved.
In short, break out of normal modes of thinking and attain Turing nature, at which point you can proclaim that all languages have Turing nature and yet retain your discriminating view.
A few other data flow programming languages, LabView (which has been around for a very long time) and is extremely popular for data acquisition (it's basically the goto choice most of the time) and the Houdini computer graphics software (there's other examples in CG as well). I pick Houdini because there's a version people can download and try. It actually works pretty well for most things.
I feel we are starting to lose the plot. The problem isn't about learning another language or which to use next. Instead it is about how to solve and represent complex problems and systems in code.
Any language is a means to an end, not the end itself.
Focusing on languages and language constructs is of value to those in academia and those working solely in the domains of computing and computer science. For the rest, it is the equivalent of navel gazing, the equivalent of focusing on grammar, when the task is authoring a novel.
I agree whole-heartedly. However, as we take on projects of larger scope and complexity, reflecting on the craft in a measured and skeptical way can be powerful and productive. It's a tricky line to walk.
I think Norvig and the author are wrong about "parallelism" requirement. I mean it's good to know what's out there, but you can't really understand it if you try to learn it from a multithreading point of view. Fundamentals for it are part of distributed systems and this is where people should get into and learn things about ordering, consensus, asynchronous and synchronous systems, etc.
It's far from enough to know a programming language. If someone knows how to write binary search on C++, he can rewrite it on Python, JS or C# pretty easily.
But software development is not about writing pure functions, it's about writing applications, so frameworks and good practices is more important than the language.
What you should really do is learn the concepts of structured programming. Every language is just a notation on top of a fundamental programming construct. If you learn those instead, you'll know every language.
I recommend reading Exercises in Programming Style by Cristina Lopes as a good starting point.
Note: I didn't watch the video yet and my opinion might change by then.
C teaches you something very useful, which is how the computer works under the hood. Most things you do in C loosely match to what the computer does, and learning C helps you understanding the computer.
I'm not saying that it's a good language to start with, but it's okay. Unlike C++.
IMO, C++ is the worst possible language to start with. The reason for this is that C++ tries to support everything, often using handy but cryptic syntax. C++ doesn't guide you to program one way or another, it simply adapts to every possible way to solve the problem. This might be good on the hands of someone that already knows how to solve the problem, but it's completly overwhelming for a begginer. It feels like you're taking the wrong turn at every step.
A much better alternative would be JavaScript. Yes, it does have flaws, but it's much simpler and has personality.
It seemed like the point of the presentation was really that C and C++ should be thought of as totally separate languages.
As long as that's remembered, I think the opposite is probably true: knowing C helps a lot to learn C++ (and vice versa) as opposed to learning either from scratch.
An 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.)
> Also, please do yourself a service and learn C# instead of Java.
Nah. Learn whatever takes your fancy. Or whatever you think will get you a job. Or learn whatever you can get tutored in because it's almost always easier to learn when you have someone you can ask questions to in person.
Learn structure and logic, but don't tell anyone they're less of a programmer because they use X instead of Y.
cryptoz|9 years ago
pfarnsworth|9 years ago
I have fallen in love with Python because it's so damn easy to get productive, and I really want to be a great Python programmer. That takes a lot more time than the OP suggests, and requires you to immerse yourself in the patterns of the language and in the community, in my opinion. Not just dabble a bit and then check a box saying "I'm a polyglot!"
no_wizard|9 years ago
Its a wonderful read. Will really unleash the pythonista inside of all us!
If you really want to go deeper, I suggest these as well:
https://goo.gl/CY6zPu https://goo.gl/UbMrTb
Those shortened links take you to amazon (not affiliated in any way, FYI, just though the length of the URLs was obnoxious)
Those are the definitive python programming books I came up with anyway.
While we are at, I have to say once I learned to really code Pythonically I find that I can apply the PEP8 standards to almost any language. Admittedly, I, like John Siracusa, am a top level language debutante and don't live in C or C++ production code (I sometimes use objc but swift is...easier :). I remember learning C, and thanks to arduino I certainly using some varient of C/c++ there more heavily, but my coding style follows more or less the pythonic standard (with PEP8 being the backbone of that).
food for thought, people of hacker news!
semi-extrinsic|9 years ago
As the old "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" article says,
> The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.
StavrosK|9 years ago
Don't try to be clever, do the simplest (and most readable) thing that will work.
Try "import this" in an interpreter to read a bit more on the above.
manaskarekar|9 years ago
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032519.do
pmontra|9 years ago
My first Ruby programs were very Java like. I doubt that my first Java programs were C like, if you use classes and methods it just can't be. No problem with using Python and Ruby together. They are maybe like German and English, close but clearly distinguishable. And Javascript, Perl, PHP, Elixir... too long to write about.
A consequence of multilingualism is that one starts noticing the differences in the implementation of the same features in different languages. Some are smooth, others are frustratingly hard to use or to remember. A quick test on a trivial nuisance, you must not Google it: in Python it's array.join(",") or ",".join(array)? And "1,2,3".split(",") or ",".split("1,2,3")? I remember only that "," goes to the opposite ends in the two expressions and I can't understand why that should be good.
tjl|9 years ago
Like you, I'm basically a C programmer at heart. But, to get efficient at some of the Maple code I had to write for my graduate work, I learnt a number of their functional tools so I now think quite a bit about using some of those as part of my toolset. I'm still largely a C-style programmer, though.
Working with the SymPy project helped me in my Python style.
Vinnl|9 years ago
JustSomeNobody|9 years ago
known|9 years ago
chrisfosterelli|9 years ago
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).
closeparen|9 years ago
Scheme for beginners, Python for web scraping and data munging, C for concurrent network and systems programming, and some small exposure to Java, Haskell, Standard ML, awk, yacc/lex, C++, and your mobile environment of choice depending on which classes you took.
Many were upset by this "very theoretical" approach, as they'd prefer to have immediately employable skills in JS-framework-of-the-week. Instead they were taught how to think independently of a particular language, and to get comfortable with learning new ones.
From a programming craft perspective, it was a little disappointing that we were never focused on advanced language features or idiomatic code, but I felt I had a solid enough base to self-teach that sort of thing.
morgante|9 years ago
nextos|9 years ago
[1] https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/VanRoyChapter.pdf
sambe|9 years ago
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).
sbuttgereit|9 years ago
I think the personal motivation that someone brings has a lot to do with how they fare short term and long term in this regard. Yes, a good University program will teach you the concepts and underlying theory expressed by language implementations; coming out of such a program you will absolutely have the jump on someone that jumped into JavaScript programming informally. You will adapt more quickly to other technologies faster, too, as you have the essentials to make that shift whereas the JS guy may not.
Having said that, if you attended and graduated college because it was something that you were "suppose to do" or because it would get you a good job and computer science was just a way to a good job after college (with no particular interest in the field otherwise)... over time the more personally interested developer that learned JS informally will likely catch up with you and overtake you.
My formal education is in music composition. However, I was programming assembly on the old 8bit machines when I was a kid. 20 years on as a technology professional, I devote large amounts of time to learning concepts and theory that aren't strictly necessary for me to program something that works well enough for my customers. I learn these things because I'm genuinely interested in the underpinnings of what I do and because I want to perfect my professional skills... not for an employer, but for my own edification: I care about what I produce because it's me producing it. There are many of my friends that did get formal education in computer science and I've surpassed them in both quality of output and overall understanding. (BTW... don't get me wrong, I have colleagues that have formal education in computer science AND the same sort of professional dedication I have... a good number of them far exceed my knowledge and understanding and I very much look up to them. Still, I'm glad I don't have to feel ashamed standing by their side professionally either).
gravypod|9 years ago
Most of my classmates don't usually "learn" a language. They do an assignment by copying, hammering at the computer, or just asking for help. The basis of how university is set up is antithetical to the learning and exploration of new programming languages. This is based on one simple thing that most universities do and is very easy to fix.
If this one thing was done, we'd probably instantly see a much higher failure rate and a much hire quality of turnout. If early on in the curriculum students got a tour of every one of the big name languages and got to just choose the best tool for the job for the rest of their time at university there'd be a much closer approximation to how things (at least for me) work.If one of your projects is something like "scrape a webpage for X data" you wouldn't want to write that in a bash script (which I've been made to do [0]) I'd want to do that in Python with BS4. Or if your project is to write a parallel dot product function you wouldn't want to write that in C (which I've been made to do [1]). I'd want to write that in Julia.
Even in my class that I took for exploring programming languages we were forced to use C++. We were writing an interpreter using C++ which I'd rather have done in some Lisp-like languages.
Unfortunatly I've not been able to make the design decition to play with other language (in school) to see how they will better impact the development of these applications. I've not had to prototype stuff to see what language it will work best in (in school). These are decitions made for me.
I've found that this isn't how things work, at least for me, and I'm the one who is told "Do X" and I pick a way to do it. Whether it's by setting up a spreadsheet it a macro in it that generates the data or writing some real code. I get to choose the most elegant solution and I suffer the consequences then I didn't choose the most elegant solution since I have to my software when it breaks 2 years down the line.
[0] - https://web.njit.edu/~sohna/cs288/hw3.html [1] - https://web.njit.edu/~sohna/cs288/hw10.html
FLUX-YOU|9 years ago
These benefits seem dubious to me in the long term unless you plan to work on compilers and languages which is certainly a noble goal and is very much a hot area right now. Picking up brainfuck in a short period of time is not really noteworthy IMO. I am also struggling to come up with a way to present this to other people without coming off as an annoying know-it-all. Do we want to value the ability to sprint or the ability to finish a marathon?
Plus, your memory will deteriorate over time without constant practice. Am I really going to commit time to reviewing all languages I choose to learn every year or so? The article seems like a challenge-to-take more than career advice.
If someone doesn't immediately want to work with languages, I would rather teach them what might be analogous to the lay of the land in our industry:
- What tools do you use to make a desktop application on Windows/Linux/Mac?
- How do the different browsers (Edge/Chrome/Firefox) implement HTML/CSS/JS? Can you make a consistent behaving application for all of them? And why should you run far, far away from any company asking you to support IE8 in 2017?
- How would you make a cross-platform library for Windows/Linux/Mac?
- How would you make a mobile application?
- What are the most popular IDE options available?
- What are the different database options available?
The difference in opinion is exactly teaching more engineering vs. teaching more science, but also learning about the ecosystem that drives language choice and development. This knowledge contributes as much to "knowing the right tool to solve the problem" ability as diverse language knowledge.
general_ai|9 years ago
pjmlp|9 years ago
Those like myself doing compiler related classes got to additionally explore Forth, Oberon, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Modula-2, Modula-3, Eiffel, Ada, Concurrent C, Objective-C, *Lisp, Sather, C+@ [1] among a few others I cannot remember now.
As Wirth puts it, it is all about algorithms and data structures, in an abstract way.
[1] - In case you never heard about this obscure relative of C++ at Bell Labs, http://www.drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=184409085&sit...
giancarlostoro|9 years ago
renox|9 years ago
idobai|9 years ago
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SimonPStevens|9 years ago
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.
lacampbell|9 years ago
What gets my goat is the idea that some recruiters have that I - as someone with mostly C# experience - would be completely useless in a Java environment.
Java and C# are so similar it's barely worth noticing. There'd be different IDEs and libraries in play - and sure, a lot of googling to remind myself of stuff in the first week. But that pales into the comparison to the amount of time I'll likely spend learning the business domain, or how the legacy code base works. That's the stuff that's truly important.
imdsm|9 years ago
I worked for a company a few years back doing ASP.NET (my experience is mostly Linux based tech, but you can pick up a language, right?). The language was fine, the design patterns used all quite standard, but the project had an array of frameworks and libraries which made maintaining it painstaking.
In fact, I think you worked on it too.
jcadam|9 years ago
I felt the same way trying to learn Haskell. The language itself isn't that hard to learn, but just try and go read some code for one of the large open source hs code bases (like Yesod, etc.) :)
I also remember being put on a C++ project after being away from the language for years (C++ 11 was... different from the C++ I used back in the early 2000s). I was completely lost for a while :O
On the other hand, some languages are easy to pick up quickly (like Go), and some just 'click' for some people (as Clojure did for me).
tjl|9 years ago
During my Master's (and my Ph.D.) I was using a finite element approach developed by a former Ph.D. of my supervisor(s). So, I asked for the code. I got back a mess of C++ and it was dependent on a linear algebra C++ library that wasn't around in the same form. I spent some time trying to reason out what he was trying to do, gave up and wrote my own in Fortran in about as much time as I spent trying to understand his.
eru|9 years ago
Yes, those take a while. It's even harder if the new language is outside of paradigms you are familiar with. Eg Prolog or Haskell would be that for most people.
Const-me|9 years ago
I’ve started coded C++/CX without noticeable degradation in productivity.
But when I need to code for e.g. linux, because of those tools and practices you’ve mentioned my productivity was much worse compared to using Visual Studio on Windows, even when using same standard C++.
achikin|9 years ago
paulddraper|9 years ago
Try replacing shell, Structured Query Language, and C with the same language. I won't say that it can't be done, but I think you'll lose a lot if you succeed.
preordained|9 years ago
Pipe dream, it would seem, but: I feel like the energy spent picking up new things could be used so much better going deeper and building more with established tools--tools hardened by collective reuse.
RivieraKid|9 years ago
What takes more time is the standard library, common libraries, tools. A good example of that is iOS development in Swift. Learning the language is almost negligible compared to learning all of the technologies and tools. But coming from Android, I think I'm close to about 50 % of full productivity after two weeks.
I never understood why there's so much focus on the "x years experience in y" in the industry. A solid developer should be able to become fluent in any language and technology within a month or two.
protomok|9 years ago
I don't think any developer can become fluent at a new language in 1-2 months. I have seen so much terrible code over the years the compiles and appears to run just fine but with massive performance issues, poor design, unreadable, security issues, memory leaks, etc. etc.
I see learning the syntax of a language to be something like 0-5% of the effort of mastering a language, knowing how to properly use a language really does take years. Although I agree that # of years of experience is not a perfect metric.
MattRix|9 years ago
eru|9 years ago
It's because grading CVs is hard.
dvcrn|9 years ago
In my current company they were looking for a Go programmer. I never wrote a single line Go before, yet they hired me and now I am writing Go. Then we had a deficit in the iOS team, so I learned Swift and now work on our app.
salex89|9 years ago
In that set of things, a new language is somewhere lower in the priority list for learning new things. Sry.
sriku|9 years ago
1. A great book that covers multiple paradigms of programming is Roy and Haridi's "Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/concepts-techniques-and-model... . This stands hand in hand with the better known SICP.
2. Folks in the CS and programming world seem to ignore bleeding edge work being done in the arts space. To get a broader view of languages than "characters that go into a plain text file", expose yourself to the live-ness of the following -
2.ø Smalltalk - one of the first fully available language and runtime that is still usable today.
2.a Max/MSP/Jitter - by David Zicrelli and Millet Pickette's - Visual data flow programming language with decades of dominance in the Computer Music scene.
2.b SuperCollider - for architecture lessons as well as another multi-paradigm language.
2.c Impromptu - a Scheme based live coding environment for music and visuals by Andrew Sorenson. Normal REPLs will bow in front of most "live coding" languages used for music.
2.d Ixilang by Thor Magnusson - another live coding language, where the language is in a sense inseparable from its run time environment. The current running behaviour of a textual program could also depend on how the program evolved.
In short, break out of normal modes of thinking and attain Turing nature, at which point you can proclaim that all languages have Turing nature and yet retain your discriminating view.
tjl|9 years ago
aryehof|9 years ago
Any language is a means to an end, not the end itself.
Focusing on languages and language constructs is of value to those in academia and those working solely in the domains of computing and computer science. For the rest, it is the equivalent of navel gazing, the equivalent of focusing on grammar, when the task is authoring a novel.
dwaltrip|9 years ago
general_ai|9 years ago
jedimastert|9 years ago
protomok|9 years ago
But I actually think we (software devs) need to focus more on mastering languages as opposed to learning many languages at a surface level.
Books like "Effective C++" (https://www.amazon.ca/Effective-Specific-Improve-Programs-De...) really showed me the huge divide between knowing a language and mastering a language.
zzzcpan|9 years ago
ww520|9 years ago
eru|9 years ago
ar15saveslives|9 years ago
But software development is not about writing pure functions, it's about writing applications, so frameworks and good practices is more important than the language.
didibus|9 years ago
I recommend reading Exercises in Programming Style by Cristina Lopes as a good starting point.
known|9 years ago
CPU is managed by the Kernel, and Memory is managed by Perl/PHP/Python/Java;
deavmi|9 years ago
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lucidguppy|9 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk
SlySherZ|9 years ago
C teaches you something very useful, which is how the computer works under the hood. Most things you do in C loosely match to what the computer does, and learning C helps you understanding the computer.
I'm not saying that it's a good language to start with, but it's okay. Unlike C++.
IMO, C++ is the worst possible language to start with. The reason for this is that C++ tries to support everything, often using handy but cryptic syntax. C++ doesn't guide you to program one way or another, it simply adapts to every possible way to solve the problem. This might be good on the hands of someone that already knows how to solve the problem, but it's completly overwhelming for a begginer. It feels like you're taking the wrong turn at every step.
A much better alternative would be JavaScript. Yes, it does have flaws, but it's much simpler and has personality.
allemagne|9 years ago
As long as that's remembered, I think the opposite is probably true: knowing C helps a lot to learn C++ (and vice versa) as opposed to learning either from scratch.
Koshkin|9 years ago
voltagex_|9 years ago
Nah. Learn whatever takes your fancy. Or whatever you think will get you a job. Or learn whatever you can get tutored in because it's almost always easier to learn when you have someone you can ask questions to in person.
Learn structure and logic, but don't tell anyone they're less of a programmer because they use X instead of Y.