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!"
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!
Just FYI: Hacker News already shortens links, no need to pass them through a 3rd party service. I personally prefer seeing a readable domain name before clicking (as I'm sure many others do as well).
As the old "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" article says,
> The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.
That's why Haskell exists. It's the computer scientists' best attempt so far to create a language in which it's impossible to write FORTRAN programs.
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.
Apart from that... What's readable tends to be the best option.
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.
The second one is the typical OO pattern where you ask an object to perform some operation on itself. This is how split works in just about every OO language - if you have trouble remembering it, it might be helpful to remember split can be called without any parameters - in that case your alternative variant won't make any sense.
And for things like pattern matching, I've played around with doing similar things in Ruby, too. For example, in Elixir you might write a method that should only ever return `:ok`, and a pattern match like this...
# if :ok, nothing special happens
# if not :ok, "MatchError" is raised
:ok = Fooer.foo(foo)
def ok!(obj)
raise "match error" unless obj == :ok
end
# if :ok, nothing special happens
# if not :ok, "match error" is raised
ok! fooer.foo
If you want to split a given string into smaller strings with an arbitrary delimiter, which instance should you call the method on?
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.
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).
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.
After I finished my undergrad degree I had an "exit interview" and I mentioned that this was one of the things I liked about the curriculum, because it helped me see that the abstract computing theory is what is important, and languages are largely a matter of syntax and convenience. The professor's response was that they so often hear the opposite, that students complain that they don't learn languages that employers want.
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).
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).
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 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
* Students expect to be able to get help when they have problems. There is a good chance no member of staff knows Julia / Moonscript / ...
* Some languages make tasks trivial -- while this is nice when you are in the real world, if I want to test student's ability to create something I don't want some students missing most of the work. How do I then mark it?
* Similarly, if the question was "implement a malloc-like memory manager", well you really have to do that in C,C++,Objective-C, maybe Rust, but it makes less sense in python.
Also, getting a "quick tour" of (say) C++ isn't really useful, students who try to pick it up by just googling are likely to write terrible code. Learning a language properly takes work.
I'd do them all in highly optimised x86 Asm, just because I can. ;-)
Not all students start at the same level; making the choice of language a free-for-all is just going to stretch that disparity even more. The ones at the top will naturally find ways to entertain themselves more, and the ones at the bottom will have no less idea of how to do things than copy-pasting code they found somewhere else (if the language doesn't matter, it makes that even easier...)
We were writing an interpreter using C++ which I'd rather have done in some Lisp-like languages.
On the other hand, I believe that doing something in an "unconventional" language for it is one way of improving your skills since you have to then apply true creativity and knowledge instead of just following an existing solution. Using a language which makes the task easy or even trivial doesn't really benefit the learning process.
Years later when I had both enough experience to appreciate these things as well as interest in programming languages I did start to grok all of this but it certainly wasn't due to my education.
As far as the second one goes, I bet that has more to do with the professors particular familiarity with C than it does an understanding of what the best tool of the job for that is. I'll cede that point :)
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.
We want to value the ability to finish the marathon, which is exactly why it's important to be able to adapt faster. The industry is constantly moving, and someone who can learn new languages and technologies easier/faster is at a huge advantage.
For a concrete example, take Objective-C and Swift. Apple has made it pretty clear that's were things are going, and a developer who has C#, Haskell, Objective-C, Python, Rust, and Ruby experience is going to make that transition much better than a developer with just Objective-C experience. This same thing even applies to frameworks within the same language (think React/Redux and functional programming experience).
> Am I really going to commit time to reviewing all languages I choose to learn every year or so?
Definitely not! You focus on the concepts in the language and don't worry about memorizing anything. Quite a few years ago I learned Go for fun. I basically ignored it after that, but when I needed it for a project recently it came back very quick.
Those other questions you pointed out are, of course, very important. I think you learn the answer to those as you learn languages as well.
In my experience, people with CS degrees do understand the low level mechanics statistically more often, on average, than people who don't have a formal education, or people who go to 2 year colleges or trade schools. There are definitely people who make it through a degree without thinking much about cache misses, but in my life I've seen far more programmers without an education fail to understand caching than programmers with an education.
I've never met anyone, educated or not, that doesn't care about performance at all. I do meet people that prioritize what they care about, and choose to weigh performance of the programmer over performance of the computer, choose to prefer working with valuable abstractions over milking every cycle out of the machine.
It depends on what you're doing. Usually, thinking about CPU cache misses in a web development environment is premature optimization and a massive waste of effort. Not always, but usually there are other more important performance considerations.
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...
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.
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 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.
IMO the largest issue is the breadth of one's experience, or lack thereof. And by that I don't mean simply the number of languages but how well versed one is in different languages and their surrounding ecosystems. For instance having good knowledge of both C# and Java isn't what I'm describing here.
Oh dear, what code of mine have you seen? :-) (email address is in my profile if it's not something publicly discussable)
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).
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.
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++.
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.
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.
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 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.
It's because grading CVs is hard.
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.
In that set of things, a new language is somewhere lower in the priority list for learning new things. Sry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I recommend reading Exercises in Programming Style by Cristina Lopes as a good starting point.
CPU is managed by the Kernel, and Memory is managed by Perl/PHP/Python/Java;
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.
I wasn't judging C++ as a beginner language. I wasn't judging C either.
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.
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.