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ai_ia | 4 years ago

This essay, which has helped fixing my initial mindset a lot, is directed for complete beginners.

The website OP mentions is for someone who already knows how to program well in one or more language and want to take a quick look at another language syntax.

discuss

DonHopkins|4 years ago

Titles like "Learn X in Y minutes" fool impatient people who don't take the time to follow links or read more than titles into believing the incorrect notion that it's possible to do what the title promises. They never get around to reading the actual articles or disclaimers that it actually takes a long time and a lot of practice to become proficient or even competent in a programming language.

Then they think they can learn programming languages by reading Twitter instead of writing code, and claim on their resumes they know languages they've only read a few blog posts about.

Those are the same people who complain that they hate Lisp by parroting tweets that it has "too many parenthesis", even though other languages have much more complex syntax, much less powerful and more limited and difficult to use macros and meta-programming facilities (like C macros and C++ templates), that force you to use an ugly mish-mash of even more inconsistent punctuation line noise like brackets, braces, escapes, quotes, backquotes, obscure operator precedence and ad-hoc parsing rules, and a myriad of other hard-to-learn punctuation that makes the code much less readable than Lisp, without realizing that there is actually a point to Lisp's clean simple parenthetical syntax.

There's also a long sad history of impatient people not wanting to bother learning JavaScript, but believing that they can simply learn JQuery or React or some other popular "silver bullet" library instead:

Can you get away with learning jQuery only instead of JavaScript?

https://www.quora.com/Can-you-get-away-with-learning-jQuery-...

Should I learn jQuery first or Javascript?

https://www.quora.com/Should-I-learn-jQuery-first-or-Javascr...

Is it necessary to learn JavaScript before learning jQuery? [duplicate]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3183545/is-it-necessary-...

Why You Should Learn jQuery Before JavaScript

https://learn.onemonth.com/why-you-should-learn-jquery-befor...

Why Beginners Should not Learn JavaScript through jQuery

https://www.codementor.io/javascript/tutorial/learn-jquery-j...

Do I need to know JavaScript in order to learn jQuery?

https://www.quora.com/Do-I-need-to-know-JavaScript-in-order-...