Re:Programming as a Foreign Language
by jwingy on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @11:29PM
(#3985236)
Interesting comparison, but I find it hard to relate to at all simply due to the sheer amount of words you need to learn in a real foreign language to achieve fluency. Seems much more daunting to me...but I guess my glasses are tinted.
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Try http://memrise.com/ for vocab learning - it's really helped expand my French vocabulary quite lot and seems to make it stick well. Doesn't really help with spoken fluency though, for that you just need lots of practice!
Thank you so much for bringing this site to my attention. It seems to have become a nice replacement for smart.fm which I used a few years ago.
Re:Programming as a Foreign Language
by georgieporgie on Thursday May 17, 2012 @12:55AM
(#3985502)
Hey, that's a really neat site! I like the way it's implemented.
I'm certain real-world languages are much harder too. I'm surprised that the author, a perler, didn't make the connection to Wall's "Natural Language Principles in Perl":
http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html
This document is quite old and I disagree with some of those things now (in particular Perl's "more than one way to do [say] it" lead to a lack of enforced standard idioms; compare python). But other points eg "acceptable levels of competence" are valuable for the humble programmer to keep in mind.
Similarly, I like the idea of a programming "accent": the effects of previous programming languages on your current language. For example a (ahem) rubyist that starts to write in python might reach for map() when they perhaps ought to use list comprehensions. A speaker with a heavy accent can still however make themselves usefully understood.