On Sep 19, 2006, at 1:40 PM, MB Software Solutions wrote:
And is it not worth learning other languages? And further, how
long does it take to
be productive in some of these programming languages?
Increasing your toolset is always a good thing.
Choosing your tools wisely is also important!
Here is a link to a story written by Eric Raymond, who claims that
he knows "over two dozen general-purpose languages, write compilers
and interpreters for fun, and have designed any number of special-
purpose languages and markup formalisms myself."
<http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882>
Excerpt:
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The thought of implementing this in Perl did not thrill me. I had
seen GUI code in Perl, and it was a spiky mixture of Perl and Tcl
that looked even uglier than my own pure-Perl code. It was at this
point I remembered the bit I had set more than six months earlier.
This could be an opportunity to get some hands-on experience with
Python.
Of course, this brought me face to face once again with Python's pons
asinorum, the significance of whitespace. This time, however, I
charged ahead and roughed out some code for a handful of sample GUI
elements. Oddly enough, Python's use of whitespace stopped feeling
unnatural after about twenty minutes. I just indented code, pretty
much as I would have done in a C program anyway, and it worked.
That was my first surprise. My second came a couple of hours into the
project, when I noticed (allowing for pauses needed to look up new
features in Programming Python) I was generating working code nearly
as fast as I could type. When I realized this, I was quite startled.
An important measure of effort in coding is the frequency with which
you write something that doesn't actually match your mental
representation of the problem, and have to backtrack on realizing
that what you just typed won't actually tell the language to do what
you're thinking. An important measure of good language design is how
rapidly the percentage of missteps of this kind falls as you gain
experience with the language.
When you're writing working code nearly as fast as you can type and
your misstep rate is near zero, it generally means you've achieved
mastery of the language. But that didn't make sense, because it was
still day one and I was regularly pausing to look up new language and
library features!
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-- Ed Leafe
-- http://leafe.com
-- http://dabodev.com
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