Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

Re:Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them by deboflo on Saturday April 13, 2019 @10:33AM (#19653209)

I learned many languages for years and I received a poor return on time investment. Later, I started learning AWS in depth and studying for certs. I now know way more than I previously did about networking, envelope encryption, messaging, infrastructure as code, pipelines, caching, CDN’s, networking protocols, load balancers, dns, and designing highly available and scalable systems. In summary, don’t forgo learning about systems to chase a hot new language.

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Re:Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them by deboflo on Saturday April 13, 2019 @10:40AM (#19653242)

Learn shell, a scripting language like Python, and a systems language like Java, C, Rust, Go, etc. I think that’s all you need to know as a backend or systems/DevOps Engineer.

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Re:Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them by hk__2 on Saturday April 13, 2019 @11:01AM (#19653369)

“That’s all you need to know” is very reductive. Never stop learning: add JS and functional languages such as Clojure, Scala, OCaml. You don’t need to use a language every day for it to be useful. Learning a bit of Objective-C taught me a lot about naming variables. Smalltalk taught me about non-class-based OOP. Forth taught me low-level stack operations. Prolog, Io, BASIC, Erlang taught me a lot of things I use everyday, even if I don’t use the languages themselves.

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Re:Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them by deboflo on Saturday April 13, 2019 @11:46AM (#19653655)

The more languages you learn, the more you realize they have more in common than not. At some point it’s time to stop learning 20+ languages and start building stuff. I never said to stop learning, but be very careful what you spend your time learning. If you can be world class at Python alone, able to solve just about any problem with it, it’s better than 100% knowing many languages. Knowing a language doesn’t mean you know all of the standard libraries and third party libraries, much less solve challenging problems efficiently.

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Re:Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them by hk__2 on Saturday April 13, 2019 @06:23PM (#19656117)

> The more languages you learn, the more you realize they have more in common than not.

That happens if you learn many similar languages, which is a waste of time. You have to learn languages in different paradigms to learn new things and discover languages that have nothing in common.

> At some point it’s time to stop learning 20+ languages and start building stuff.

You can’t learn a language without building stuff.

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Re:Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them by deboflo on Sunday April 14, 2019 @04:04AM (#19658138)

“You can’t learn a language without building stuff” <—- the title of this post implies not only that you can, but should. I believe it’s a waste to learn without hope of applying what’s been learned. I’m learning TLA+ right now because I plan on using it to build more robust systems.

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Re:Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them by deboflo on Saturday April 13, 2019 @10:42AM (#19653253)

Throw in some basic HTML, css, and JavaScript as well.

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Re:Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them by picacho on Saturday April 13, 2019 @02:35PM (#19654847)

and system isn't rocket science, it's been coded by good engineers knowing the limit thus gives you a good abstraction for you to learn it quickly. that is, get hands dirty and start coding. Look at those who were _so_ good at Novell's NetWare admin goes? Loot at those who were _so_ good at openstack goes? And no more longer, you can see those who were _so_ good at k8s goes XD Look

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