[ot][spam][crazy] small notes for relearning software dev
A basic attribute of being a skilled coder is being language agnostic: being freely able to write in a new language, and having roughly equal difficulty and skill in whatever la guage you encounter. Nowadays I mostly know python, and mostly remember C and C++ . Languages seem to stick around only if I use them, roughly. I’m thinking a good idea could be to practice having skill at many languages. I came up with a list of ideas: - go - rust - c++ - lisp/scheme - typescript/javascript - julia maybe also: - haskell - erlang C++ is because I used to know it best and staying up on it involves a lot of reading. Go and Rust are because they seem popular and normative nowadays. Typescript/javascript for both of those reasons. Scheme/Erlang/Haskell because they are significantly different to learn, and are also useful for major projects. Julia is also significantly different, and has utility for building skills around machine learning. It seems it could be useful to break the skills of language learning and language changing into parts, and see if they can be considered for different languages. In machine learning, there’s an idea that some data is way more useful to study than other data: such as disparate parts of unfamiliar languages with common attributes maybe. That seems to apply here, although I also have much less skilled memory than a large language model, so breaking things consciously into useful generalizations seems to have higher return. There are lists on the internet of hundreds and hundreds of random programming languages. These could be drawn from to practice speed of learning a new language.
I meant to include python the list, as it’s the language I use easiest nowadays. —- Thoughts on quickly learning new languages. - speed reading - effective knowledge of language norms - inference of hoe much new material there is so as to select effective approaches When one knows a lot about languages, one gets a sense of normal patterns that can let one skip a lot of material when learning, because it is simply repetition. So, there could be a lot of return to memorizing things that are common between many language styles and/or resources for learning languages. Often a language may be so normative for its family that use can begin without learning it, simply keeping a reference handy for specifics. When this is the case, it seems useful to make sure that material gained from the reference is actually retained, so that there is actual learning taking place. When starting learning a new language, finding indicators that reveal how normative or new it is likely to be, so as to guide how to effectively approach it, seems helpful. Some norms of language families are very common. I’m thinking, though, that to try to rebuild fluidity of the mind, it could be helpful to think of various properties of language families, rather than specifics of common ones.
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