Surprised pikachu face
improves my experience coding in unfamiliar languages
Alan Perlis said “A programming language that doesn’t change the way you think is not worth learning.”
So… if you code in another language without actually “getting it”, solely having a usable result, what is actually the point of changing languages?
Exactly. I see AI as a tool to automate the boring parts, if you try to automate the hard parts, you’re going to have a bad time.
Take the time to learn the tools you use thoroughly, and then you can turn to AI to make your use of those tools more efficient. If I’m learning woodworking, for example, I’m going to learn to use hand tools first before using power tools, but there’s no way I’m sticking to hand tools when producing a lot of things. Programming isn’t any different, I’ll learn the language and its idioms as deeply as I can, and only then will I turn to things like AI to spit out boilerplate to work from.
I’m not sure how to succinctly do that.
When I learn a new language, I:
- go through whatever tutorial is provided by the language developers - for Rust, that’s The Rust Programming Language, for Go, it’s Tour of Go and Effective Go
- build something - for Go, this was a website, and for Rust it was a Tauri app (basically a website); it should be substantial enough to exercise the things I would normally do with the language, but not so big that I won’t finish
- read through substantial portions of the standard library - if this is minimal (e.g. in Rust), read through some high profile projects
- repeat 2 & 3 until I feel confident I understand the idioms of the language
I generally avoid setting up editor tooling until I’ve at least run through step 3, because things like code completion can distract from the learning process IMO.
Some books I’ve really enjoyed (i.e. where 1 doesn’t exist):
- The C Programming Language - by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Richie
- Programming in Lua - by Roberto Ierusalimschy
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good - by Miran Lipovača (available free online)
But regardless of the form it takes, I appreciate a really thorough introduction to the language, followed by some experimentation, and then topped off with some solid, practical code examples. I generally allow myself about 2 weeks before expecting to write anything resembling production code.
These days, I feel confident in a dozen or so programming languages (I really like learning new languages), and I find that thoroughly learning each has made me a better programmer.
