Tag: languages

Learn programming, not a language. But know your language(s).

There are discussions about focusing on programming, not on a particular programming language. Choose a language you enjoy and exercise general topics that can be implemented in any programming language. Later, when you’ll need a new language, you’ll already have the knowledge of programming. And switching to a new language is easy.

It’s true, you can switch to new languages, have some patience to get to know them, and you will soon be pretty used to the syntax. It can take some time to know what a language is capable of, but being able to write more than a few lines of code won’t take an eternity.

And you can stop here. We are done. Nothing new, nothing special. The most that the lines above could give is another confirmation from another person, a boost of self-confidence if I want to use big words.

If you got to this line, maybe you thought I have more to say, it couldn’t have been just that. I think what follows is more of talking to myself, thinking out loud, because again, it’s not something new; it’s just that I don’t read often about a specific flavor of learning programming languages.

It can be critical to know, besides general programming, the language that you are using. To really know it. You can solve nice problems with any language. Until the context is not nice. Until the context kicks you in the back without knowing what hit you. It’s all about context. If correctness, performance, scalability, or ease of maintenance and extension do not matter, there’s no point to focus on them. Implement your business requirements and you’re good. But when they do matter, knowing to approach them includes knowing your language.

And I want to consider two aspects. Continue reading Learn programming, not a language. But know your language(s).

Language X is easy to switch to

I’ve heard “it’s easy to switch to a new language, it’s just a language, you just learn a new syntax”.

Well, I partially disagree. While you’ll may be able to learn the syntax fast, each language has its own particularities that you don’t just understand in a few days. Some languages have other best practices than others.

I believe that if you jump on writing code in a new language without understanding its philosophy, you’ll miss a lot of edge cases that will lead to undesired situations. Most probably no one will die, but time will be lost.

“We chose Node because we already had JavaScript developers, and it’s the same thing” – Yeah, server side optimization is the same thing. Same for concurrency. Or properly handling the file system.

“I took a look at Go and it’s trivial” – And a few months later you’ll end up tangled in your own work, refactoring each step.

While onboarding to the new project you have with that new language, I suggest  reading the docs, understanding the language’s best use, maybe right from the authors.