Re:Ask HN: How Do You Optimize Your Intake of Information?
by lizmat on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @01:36PM
(#23021892)
Just for the record: Perl 6 has since been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media).
Re:Ask HN: How Do You Optimize Your Intake of Information?
by brudgers on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @04:52PM
(#23024141)
Back in 2015, it was still "Perl 6" as it had been for more than a decade and as it stayed until about six months ago. Rakudo Star 2015.09 had come out as "a useful, useable" release which was why I tried it. In a sense, the renaming points to how much still remained to be done over the next four years. Lots of little things that create small frictions. And it's easy to say "Well, just..." to each of them, and for other people that's surely enough but I learned that I didn't want to deal with it. Ultimately, it was a case of not fitting with the Perl 6 community, not because of hostility or anything negative. I didn't fit because Perl 6 assumed a background I didn't have and addresses an important set of problems that I don't have either. That's one of the important things I learned since selecting techs back in 2015.
My first thought was to pick something new so I "would be ahead in the game." In one or the other order I tried Perl 6 and Elm. Perl 6 lacked a coherent set of systematic resources at the time and Elm was then so unstable that tutorials fell apart within a few minutes of the most basic 'Hello World.'
I regrouped and decided to avoid the cutting edge and started thinking about learning things that are extremely stable instead. For me, these were Emacs, Linux, and Javascript. Javascript because I had been avoiding it (hence Elm); Emacs and Linux because I was using them all the time.
It's true I don't spend a lot of time learning Javascript, Emacs, and Linux these days. What happened was I learned enough of each that it's easier to learn more if I need to for example, sometimes I start with the man page before Googling and other times I stop Googling and just read the man page.
I'm not recommending Javascript, Emacs, and Linux per se. But what they gave me was a framework for deciding what to learn. It has to be worth spending a year with. It has to be small enough to fit in one person's head from scratch -- a small head in my case. Team sized technologies are out of the running.
To put it another way, I focused on learning "techs" I could live with. And one of the ways of recognizing those "techs" was that I was already living with them and that was in part because they had long lives. Sometimes I was using them already.