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The amount of available programming languages is both a bless and a curse, I think.
I know a lot of programming languages already, some at syntax-level only and some good enough to do actual coding (Python, C, C++, Haskell, Perl, BASH, PHP, and lots of others). I have been programming for almost as long as I've been intensivly using computers (6 years), in almost every paradigm (functional, imperative, object oriented), but I don't feel prepared for the software industry.
I've been writing a lot of bigger programs in a lot of different languages, mostly network based, including large multithreaded server/clients, and I still don't feel prepared!
Currently I'm obsessed with my "3-tier" plan, which includes a high level language like Haskell, an interpreted language like Python and a low level language like C, yet I don't feel good enough!
I know how to work in teams, and how to work along given guidelines, but I'm unsure.
Am I prepared?
Please, kind people of stackoverflow, help me out of this mess! :(
Thanks for all the answers, I wish I could chose more answers as THE answer :)
Sounds like you know an awful lot about programming, but you don't mention anything else. Being a software developer requires more than just programming as a technical skill. Brush up on topics such as source code control, unit testing/test-driven development, continuous integration, etc. Hopefully you'll land in a job where at least one of those is in use. Try and learn as many useful time-savers as you can with your tools; try to become as flexible and efficient with your IDE as possible.
Elsewhere, don't forget to develop the more personal skills; attitude and work ethic, and more related to your field, issues such as eliciting requirements, documenting issues and describing problems and solutions. Don't worry too much about these if you're going in afresh, because you're not expected to have a huge knowledge of them, but if you're at least aware of them and trying to improve, then you have a greater chance of doing so.
Try to appraise yourself of general software development issues that aren't directly coding, if you haven't already - general attitudes to security-oriented development (and testing), good design and similar best practices.
Don't sweat too much about being perfect right off the bat. If you've got no room for improvement, you aren't going to enjoy your career very long, and burning out as a programmer ain't much fun.
You know enough - there is a minimum threshold of knowledge required in the industry (which is above what some developers have), but it sounds like you are already there.
For anyone with the aptitude, new programming languages, techniques, etc, are easy to learn. A good company to work for will hire you based on your abilities, not knowledge (which can go stale very quickly).
If you want to stand out as a software developer, ensure you have rock solid communication skills for reports, e-mail, telephone, meetings, etc. That is a rarer gift in the software field, and although it is not necessary more valuable at the junior levels, it pays off in the long run.
The single most important thing I can think of to be successful in the industry is to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to change.
I recently took a programming test which I thought was a good and fair test. I passed it without a great deal of effort. I was told that 50% of the people (these are all people with programmer on the resume) don't even know where to start. Your earnestness and desire will most likely put you in the top third of most places to start with.
Knowning languages is not all you can do.
If you can, a placement/internship will do wonders. Anyone can program. Real world experience will teach you more than any tutorials, self learning or schooling will.
Naturally, gaining an internship requires some experience, so it's very much catch twenty two.
If going for an internship is not possible, get involved with an open source project. You'll find you'll learn loads by working with people smarter than you.
True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.
Socrates some smart dude
I think this is pretty common among developers. Imo it´s a way better sign then if you would come to the conclusion that you were fully trained.
The only way to know for sure if you're prepared is to try. Sometimes being thrown in the deep end actually helps and you'll find you learn more in that first real world job than you did in all the books/etc that you read in the years before. Also, knowing multiple languages helps you understand underlying semantics of programming in general, but in a real job you'll likely be sticking to one or two languages day to day, so don't get hung up on knowing every language out there.
It's better to try & fail than to spend your life wondering if you're ready.
Go to dice or monster or whatever your favorite job site is and see what people are looking for. It's not Haskell, it's C++. Learn that well and you're ready to go. Once you're out in the real world, you'll learn quickly enough the things that are important. These are mostly the soft skills that school doesn't teach you. Things like how to get along with the clueless, how to present your ideas so they'll actually be considered, and how to see the forest even though you're stuck under a rock.
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So, I'm almost 100% self taught in programming (save for a course in C after I had already taught myself C). This means that to keep myself programming, I have to be constantly finding materials (i.e. tutorials) on the web (I'm poor). Unfortunately, I've found myself stuck in a sort of limbo, where I understand the basics of programming (in theory, I'm able to grab a new language and get comfortable enough to solve a few Project Euler problems, as is evident by my time spent here) but I'm not able to get any deeper than that, like GUI programming or web interfacing.
I don't know if it's just me, but there seems to be a sort of great divide in terms of the level of difficulty in the tutorials on the internet. All I can find fall under either Maddeningly Easy or Maddeningly Difficult. Are there no intermediate tutorials out there? The kind that say, okay, you've seen this before, here's some code but we'll explain what's happening. But I digress.
Given my lack of ability to breach the practicality gap in terms of programming, I find myself stagnating. I can only teach myself the first six Project Euler problems in so many languages. I need to find something, some sort of project, before my spark dies out. I'm worried about it. I know this is such a broad question, but... can anyone help me out? Point me in some sort of direction?
You need to start making things. You can start out small, but find a project that you can contribute to or that you want to work on yourself.
If you can't think of anything "useful" to make, then start writing simple games: a tetris clone, a top-down shooter, something like that. It doesn't have to have AAA graphics but even a simple game like tetris will teach a lot about the more complex structure of a program, user interface, and that sort of thing. But at the same time there's nothing so complicated than you'll get completely stuck.
Passion is not something that will die out that easily. There are tons of local user groups/developer groups that you can join to learn from them (most of them are free) To get to some of what you defined as intermediate problem, getting a job is definitely the best solution. You could work on Dave Thomas's coding kata. For difficult ones, you can do some facebook puzzles (they get real hard at the second level and up, easily take hours to days to solve)
A couple of suggestions which I might offer, as they have worked for me in the past, when in the same situation:
1) Get involved in an Open Source Project.
One of the best ways to learn programming is to read/review/refactor code created by other programmers. You learn new tricks, as well as good style guides for formatting your code in later work, and start building a good understanding of a pile of packages which you can roll together to create solutions down the track.
2) (If you aren't already) Get a Job as a Programmer.
The single greatest kind of learning experience I have had when it comes to programming is when I need to extend my skillset to solve a particular problem. Being put in a role where you are given a problem, which, when you start, is beyond your skills and then creating a solution using experimentation, sourcing existing solutions online, referring to documentation, asking a learned colleague, etc. is great. It is almost like a trade apprenticeship - you learn as you go and sooner or later you can handle 95% of the solutions autonomously.
One thing I have seen said time and time again on various blogs and forums is that trying to be highly skilled in a wide range of languages is an almost impossible challenge - it is better to pick one (or maybe two) and then practice, practice, practice to develop it's associated skillset to a great degree.
Perhaps you should start working on REAL WORLD projects for either friends or family.
This will give you positive feedback for your efforts and a sense of "acheivement" when the job is finished.
Great programming theory is all very good, but without introducing some kind of "reward cycle" I can understand how frustrated you could become.
You need to start and finish a project that's a large enough to force you to learn different things, but small enough to actually finish. Here are some ideas:
Jabber client
RSS reader
Twitter client
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How do you work with someone when they haven't been able to see that there is a range of other languages out there beyond "The One True Path"?
I mean someone who hasn't realised that the modern software professional has a range of tools in his toolbox. The person whose knee jerk reaction is, for example, "We must do this is C++!" "Everything must be done in C++!"
What's the best approach to open people up to the fact that "not everything is a nail"? How may I introduce them to having a well-equipped toolbox, selecting the best tool for the job at hand?
As long as there are valid reasons for it to be done in C++, I don't see anything wrong with this monolithic approach.
Of course a good programmer must have many different tools in his/hers toolbox, but these tools don't need to be a new language, it can simply be about learning new programming paradigms.
As much as I've experienced actually, learning many different languages doesn't make you much of a better programmer at all.
This is also true with finding the right language for the job. Yeah ok, if you're doing concurrency you might want a functional language rather than an Object Oriented language, but what are the gains of using another programming language?
At the end of the day; "Maintenance".
If it can be maintained without undue problems then the debate may well be moot and comes down to preference or at least company policy/adopted technology.
If that is satisfied then the debate becomes "Can it be built efficiently to be cost effective and not cause integration problems?"
Beyond that it's simply the screwdriver/build a house argument.
Give them a task which can be done much easily in some other language/technology and also its hard to do it the language/technology that he/she is suggesting for everything.
This way they will eventually search for alternatives as it gets harder and harder for them to accomplish the task using the language/technology that they know.
Lead by example, give them projects that play to their strengths, and encourage them to learn.
If they are given a task that is obviously better suited for some other technology and they choose to use a less effective language, don't accept the work. Tell them it's not an appropriate solution to the problem. Think of it as no different then them choosing Cobol to take the replace of a shell script -- maybe it works, but it will be hard to maintain over time, take too long to develop, require expensive tools, etc.
You also need to take a hard look at the work they do and decide if it's really a big deal or not if it's done in C++. For example, if you have plenty of staff that knows that language and they finished the task in a decent amount of time, what's the harm? On the other hand, if the language they choose slows them down or will lead to long term maintenance problems they need to be aware of that.
There are plenty of good programmers who only know one language well. That fact in and of itself can't be used to determine if they are a valuable member of a team. I've known one-language guys who were out of this word, and some that I wouldn't have on a team if they worked for free.
Don't hire them.
Put them in charge of a team of COBOL programmers.
Ask them to produce a binary that outputs an infinite Fibonacci sequence.
Then show them the few lines (or 1 line, depending on the implementation) it takes in Haskell, and that it too can be compiled into a binary so there are better ways forward.
How may I introduce them to having a
well-equipped toolbox, selecting the
best tool for the job at hand?
I believe that the opposite of "one true language" is "polyglot programming", and I will then refer to another answer of mine:
Is polyglot programming important?
I actually doubt that anybody can nowadays realize a project in one and only one language (even though there might be exceptions). The easiest way to show them the usefulness of specific tools and languages, is then to show them that they are already using several ones, e.g. SQL, build file, various XML dialect, etc.
Though I embrace the polyglot perspective, I do also believe that in many area "less is more". There is a balance to find between the number of language/tools, the learning curve, and the overall productivity.
The challenge is to decide which small set of languages/tools fit nicely together in your domain and will push productivity and creativity to new limits.
Give them a screwdriver and tell them to build a house?
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Its always said that more you program, the better you become. Sounds good and true.
But I was wondering if there is a proven route to becoming a better programmer.
Something like:
Learn a
Learn b
Learn c > 'Now you are good to burn the engines'
Try stuff around based on your learning.
The answer might be similar to a CS course roadmap, but I want to hear from successful programmers who might want to pitch in with something notable.
Thanks
It's not true that practice makes perfect.
It's perfect practice that makes perfect.
If all you do is keep repeating the same bad practices again and again, you'll only make it possible to create bad code faster.
By all means keep coding. But at the same time be critical of everything you do. Always have a jaundiced eye that looks for ways to do things better. Read widely to get new ideas. Talk to others about how they do things. Look at other people's code, good and bad.
There's no "sure" way to learn anything that I know of. If there was, anyone could master this.
All questions are rhetorical and meant to stimulate thought.
Technical parts:
Design Patterns - There are probably some specific to a domain but generally these are useful ways of starting parts of an application. Do you know MVC or MVP?
Basic algorithm starting points - Divide and conquer, dynamic programming, recursion, creating special data types like a heap, being greedy, etc.
Problem solving skills - How easily can you jump in and find where a bug is? Can you think of multiple solutions to the problem?
Abstract modelling - How well can you picture things in your head in terms of code or classes when someone is describing a problem?
High level versus low level - How well do you understand when one wants something high or low? This is just something I'd toss out there as these terms get through around a lot, like a high level view of something or a low level language.
Process parts:
Agile - Do you know Scrum, XP, and other new approaches to managing software projects? How about principles like YAGNI, DRY and KISS? Or principles like SOLID? Ideas like Broken Windows?
Developer Environment - How well do you know the IDE you use? Source Control? Continuous Integration? Do you know the bottle necks on your machine in terms of being productive?
xDD - Do you know of TDD, BDD, and other developments driven from a paradigm?
Refactoring - Do you go back over your old code and make it better or do you tend to write once and then abandon your code?
Soft skills:
Emotional Intelligence - Can be useful for presentations and working with others mostly.
Passions/Motivation - Do you know what gets your juices flowing and just kick butt in terms of being productive? Do you know what you would like to do for many many years?
My main piece of advice would be: don't be afraid to rewrite your own code. Look at stuff you wrote even a month ago and you will see flaws and want to rewrite stuff.
Make sure that you understand some fundamentals: collections, equality, hashcodes etc. These are useful across pretty much all modern languages.
Depending on the language you use - use lint and metric tools and run them over your code. Not all their suggestions will be applicable but learning which are important and which are not is important. E.g FindBugs, PMD etc for Java.
Above all refine and keep refining your work. Don't treat your work as abandonware!
Learn your 1st programming language a new programming paradigm or a
find a mentor you can learn from
Apply what you've learnt in a real world project
Learn from your mistakes and successes and goto step one
The trick is knowing what to learn first:
Programming languages - this is the place to start bcause you cannot write software without knowing at least one of these. After you've mastered one language try learning another.
Programming paradigm - i.e. object oriented, dynamic/functional programming etc. Try to learn a new one with each new language.
Design concepts - S.O.L.I.D, design patterns as well as architectural concepts.
People skills - learn to communicate your ideas.
Team leadership - learn how to sweep others and how to become a team or technological lead.
After that the sky is the limit.
I would look at improving roughly in this order, in iterations with each building on the previous one:
Programming concepts. Understand things like memory management, pointers, stacks, variable scope, etc.
Languages. Work on mastering several modern languages.
Design concepts. Learn about design patterns. Practice using them.
Communication. Often-overlooked. You can only become a highly valued Software Engineer if you can communicate effectively with non-tech people. Learn to listen and understand the needs that people are expressing, translate that into a set of requirements and a technical design, but then explain what you understood (and designed) back to them, in terms they can understand, for validation before you code. This is not an easy one to master, but it is essential.
Architectural concepts. Learn to understand the big picture of large, complex systems.
Learning a programming language is in many ways similar to learning a spoken language. The only way to get good at it is to do it as often as possible. In other works
Practice, practice, read and then practice more
Take time to learn about all sorts of coding techniques, tools and programming wisdom. This I have found to be crucial to my development. It's to easy to just code away and feel productive. What about what could be if you just had some more knowledge / weaponry under your belt to bang out that next widget.
Knowledge/know how is our real currency. The more we know the more we can make a better decision about how something should be done and do it faster.
For example, learn about:
•Development Practices, Software Design, Estimation, Methodologies Business Analysis Database Design (there are a lot of great books out there and online resources)
•Read Code - Open Source Projects are a good place for this. Read
Programming blogs
•Try to participate on Open Source
Projects.
•Look for programming user groups in
your town and/or someone who can mentor you.
And yes, as mentioned practice. Don't just read, do and watch how you will improve. :)
Practice, practice, practice.
Once you're over the basic hump of being able to program, you can also read useful books (i.e. Code Complete, Effective Java or equivalents, etc.) for ideas on how to improve your code.
First and foremost write code. Write as much as you can. Tackle hard problems. If you want to be a really good programmer you need to get into the guts of what you are doing. Spend a lot of time in debuggers looking at how things work. If you want to be a good programmer who really understands what is going on you need to get down to the metal and write highly async code, learn about how processors work and why SSE is so awesome. Understand threading primitives and be able to write them as well as describe what is actually happening in the processor. I could keep going here but you get the idea.
Second find someone who knows a lot more than you and learn. This relationship will work better if you are already deeply immersed in writing lots of code.
Third, spend some time in a large high quality open source code base. I learned a ton from the Quake I and Quake II code. Helped me be a better programmer.
Fourth take on hard problems. Push your limits. Build things that you thought were impossible. Right now I am writing a specialized compiler. I have learned so much just working on this for the last couple of months.
Sure, strictly speaking, the more you practice programming, the better you become at solving those sorts of problems. But is that what you really want?
Programming is a human activity more than a technological one, at its heart. It's easy to improve your computer skills, not so hard to improve your interpersonal skills.
Read "Journey of the Software Professional" by Hohmann. One of the concepts the concepts Hohmann describes is the "cognitive library," which includes both programming skills and non-programming skills. Expand your cognitive library, and your programming skill will improve too.
Read a lot of non-programming books too, and observe the world around you. Creating useful metaphors is an essential skill for the successful programmer. Why do restaurants do things how they do? What trade-offs is the garbage department making when they pick up the garbage every few days instead of every day? How does scaling affect how a grocery store does business? Be an inquisitive human to be a better programmer.
For me, there has to be a reason to learn something new... that is, unless I have a project in mind or some problem I need to solve, there's no hope. If that prerequisite is met, then I usually try to get "Hello, world" working, and after that the sky's the limit. So much of development these days is just learning new APIs. Occasionally there's some kind of paradigm shift that blows your mind, but that's not as common as people like to think, IMHO.
Find a program that intrigues you, one that solves a problem, or one that would simplify many of your tasks. Try to write something similar. You'll get up to speed very quickly and have fun doing it at the same time.
You can try learning one thing really well and then expanding out to programming areas that are associated with the things that you have learnt, so that you can offer complete solutions to customers.
At the same time, devote part of your time to explore things outside your comfort zone.
One you have learned something, try to learn something a little harder. Read and practice a lot about things that seem confusing at first time (lambda functins, threading, array manipulation, etc). It will take its time, but once you have practiced enough, what seemed confusing at first, will be familiar and easy.
In addition to the rest of the great advice already given here, don't be afraid to read about coding and good practice, but also take everything with a grain of salt and see what works best for you. A lot of advice is opinion.
Good sites to read:
-thedailywtf.com
-joelonsoftware.com
-codinghorror.com
-blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing
A great place to get practice is programming competition websites. Those will help you learn how to write good algorithms, not necessarily maintainable code, but they're still a good place to start for learning.
The one I used to use (back when I had time) was:
http://uva.onlinejudge.org/
Learn more than one language. One at a time, definitely, but ultimately you should be fluent in a couple. This will give you a better perspective I think, and help you to become an expert at programming, rather than being an expert at a certain language.
Learn the ins and outs of computers at all levels, hardware, os, etc. Ideally you should be able to build your own system, install multiple operating systems on it, and diagnose just about every problem that can arise. I know many programmers who are not "computer tech people" and their failure to understand what is happening at every level becomes a major hindrance in diagnosing and fixing unusual bugs or performance issues.
As well as looking at 'last weeks code', talk to users of your work after delivery - be one yourself if possible.
Its not my bag, but some of the best coders I know have spent time supporting applications. The experience improved their product I'm sure.
eat breath dream the programming language your using (no seriously, it helps)
There are two kinds of learning -
1. Informal (like how you learned how to function in society- through interaction with peers and family)
2. Formal (like your high school training- through planned instruction)
If you want an entry-level programming job, formal training via an undergrad Computer Science/Engineering degree is the way to go. However, if you want to become a rock-star developer, it is best done by informal training- make unintentional mistakes and have senior developers curse at you, learn a design pattern because an app you are updating uses it, almost cry because a bad developer wrote a huge messy program lacking documentation and best practices and now you have to do several updates to it ASAP; thing of these nature.
It is hard for anyone to give you a list of all you need to know. It varies per area (e.g. a web developer vs. to a desktop developer) and it varies per company (e.g. Microsoft that sells software vs. General Motors that mainly just use it in their cars.) Informal traiing and being engaged in trying to learn to do your job better and get promoted is your best bet in my opinion.
To prove my point, everyone here has great answers but they all differ. Ask a rock-star developer how he learned something or when, why; they may not know- things just happen.
Practice, individually and collectively
Keep an open mind, always learn new things, don't limit yourself to what's familiar. Not solely from a tech perspective, ui design, people skills, ... Don't be afraid of what's new
Peer review, talk to people about your code, let people talk to you about their code, everyone has a unique way of looking at a problem and you will learn a great deal from peers
Love coding. If you love what you're doing, putting in alot of time seems effortless. Every coder needs the drive!
One small addition to these good answers. When I work on someone else's code, usually I pick up something new. If you have the opportunity to work with someone else that is of equal or greater skill, noticing their programming style can teach you tons.
For example, in C++ & Javascript I no longer use if() statements without braces. The reason is that it's just too easy to mistakenly put:
while (true) {
if (a > b)
print a
print b
}
This is an obvious typo, but very easy to introduce, especially if you're editing existing code. I just call it defensive programming in my mind, but little tricks like this are valuable at making you better.
So, find a peer or mentor, and work on their code.
I am not sure if the OP was looking for general advice on how to be a good programmer, but rather something more specific.
I know I am reviving this thread, but I found it because I was trying to see if anyone asked this question already.
What I had in mind was, can we come up with a "knowledge-map" of programming concepts similar to the map that Khan Academy uses.
As a programmer, I want to be able to visualize the dependencies and relationships between different ideas, so that I can understand what skill level I am currently at; what I need to know before tackling a challenging subject; and be able to visualize my progress.
The very belief in the roadmap's existence blocks the road to perfection.
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Have you ever tried learning a language while on a project? I have, and from my personal experience I can say that it takes courage, effort, time, thinking, lots of caffeine and no sleep. Sometimes this has to be done without choice, other times you choose to do it; if you are working on a personal project for example.
What I normally do in this kind of situation, and I believe everyone does, is "build" on top of my current knowledge of languages, structures, syntax and logic. What I find difficult to cope with, is the difference of integrity in some cases. Some languages offer a good background for future learning and "language study", they pose as a good source of information or a frame of reference and can give a "firm" grasp of what's to come. Other languages form or introduce a new way of thinking and are harder to get used to.
Sometimes you unintentionally think in a specific language and when introduced to a new way of thinking, a new language, can cause confusion or make you get lost between the "borders" of your new and your current knowledge of languages.
What can be a good solution in this case? What should be used to broaden the knowledge of the new language, a new way of thinking, and maintain or incorporate the current knowledge of other languages inside the "borders" of the new language?
I find I need to do a project to properly learn a language, but those can be personal projects. When I learned Python on the job, I first expected (and found) a significant slowdown in my productivity for a while. I read the standard tutorials, coding standards and I lurked on the Python list for a while, which gave me a much better idea of the best practices of the language.
Doing things like coding dojos and stuff when learning a language can help you get a feel for things. I just recently changed jobs and went back to Java, and I spent some time working on toy programs just to get back in the feel for things (I'm also reading Effective Java, 2nd edition as my previous major experience had been with Java 1.4).
I think, in some respects no matter what the impetus for learning the language, you have to start by imitating good patterns in the new language. Whether that means finding a good book, with excellent code examples, good on-line tutorials, or following the lead of a more experienced developer, you have to absorb what it means to write good code in a particular language first. Once you have developed a level of comfort, you can start branching out and and experimenting with alternatives to the patterns that you've learned, looking for ways to apply things you've learned from other languages, but keeping within the "rules" of the language. Eventually, you'll get to the point where you know you can 'break the rules" that you learned earlier because you have enough experience to know when they do/don't apply.
My personal preference, even when forced to learn a new language, is to start with some throw away code. Even starting from good tutorials, you'll undoubtedly write code that later you will look back on and not understand how stupid you could have been. I prefer, if possible, to write as my first foray into a language code that will be thrown away and not come back to haunt me later. The alternative is to spend a lot of time refactoring as you learn more and more. Eventually, you'll end up doing this, too.
I would like to mention ALT.NET here
Self-organizing, ad-hoc community of developers bound by a desire to improve ourselves, challenge assumptions, and help each other pursue excellence in the practice of software development.
So in the spirit of ALT.NET, it is challenging but useful to reach out of your comfort zone to learn new languages. Some things that really helped me are as follows:
Understand the history behind a language or script. Knowing evolution helps a lot.
Pick the right book. Research StackOverflow and Amazon.com to find the right book to help you ease the growing pains.
OOP is fairly common in most of the mature languages, so you can skip many of the chapters related to OOP in many books. Syntax learning will be a gradual process. I commonly bookmark some quick handy guides for that.
Read as many community forums as possible to understand the common pitfalls of the new language.
Attend some local meetups to interact with the community and share your pains.
Take one pitch at a time by building small not so complicated applications and thereby gaining momentum.
Make sure you create a reference frame for what you need to learn. Things like how security, logging, multithreading are handled.
Be Open minded, you can be critical, but if you hate something then do not learn that language.
Finally, I think it is worthwhile to learn one strong languages like C# or Java, one functional language and one scripting language like ruby or python.
These things helped me tremendously and I think will help all software engineers and architects to really gear for any development environment.
I learned PHP after I was hired to be the project lead on the Zend Framework project.
It helped that I had 20 years of professional programming background, and good knowledge of C, Java, Perl, JavaScript, SQL, etc. I've also gravitated towards dynamic scripting languages for most of my career. I've written applications in awk, frameworks in shell, macro packages in troff, I even wrote a forum using only sed.
Things to help learn a language on the job:
Reading code and documentation.
Listening to mailing lists and blogs of the community.
Talking to experts in the language, fortunately several of whom were my immediate teammates.
Writing practice code, and asked for code reviews and coaching.(Zend_Console_Getopt was my first significant PHP contribution).
Learning the tools that go along with the language. PHPUnit, Xdebug, phpDoc, phing, etc.
Of course I did apply what I knew from other programming languages. Many computer science concepts are language-universal. The differences of a given language are often simply idiomatic, a way of stating something that can be done another way in another language. This is especially true for languages like Perl or PHP, which both borrow a lot of idioms from earlier languages.
It also helped that I took courses in Compiler Design in college. Having a good foundation in how languages are constructed makes it easier to pick up new languages. At some level, they're all just ways of abstracting runtime stacks and object references.
If you're a junior member of the team and don't know the language, this is not necessarily an issue at all. As long as there is some code review and supervision, you can be a productive.
Language syntax is one issue, but architectural differences are a more important concern. Many languages are also development platforms, and if you don't have experience with the platform, you don't know how to create a viable solution architecture. So if you're the project lead or working solo, you'd better have some experience on the platform before you do your design work.
For example, I would say an experienced C# coder with no VB experience would probably survive a VB.NET project just fine. In fact, it would be more difficult for a developer who only had experience in C#/ASP.NET to complete a C# WPF project than a VB ASP.NET project. An experienced PHP developer might hesitate a bit on a ColdFusion project, but they probably won't make any serious blunders because they are familiar with a script based web development architecture.
Many concepts, such as object modelling and database query strategies, translate just fine between languages. But there is always a learning curve for a new platform, and sometimes it can be quite nasty. The worst case is that the project must be thrown out because the architure is too wrong to refactor.
I like to learn a new language while working on a project, because a real project will usually force me to learn aspects of the language that I might otherwise skip. One of the first things I like to to is read code in that language, and jump in. I find resources (such as books and various internet sites) to help as I go along.
Then, after I've been working on it for a while, I like to read (or re-read) books or other resources on the language. By this time I have some knowledge, so this will help solidify some things and also point out areas where I am flat-out wrong in my understanding. For instance, I can see that I was making incorrect assumptions about similarities between languages.
This also applies to tools -- after using a tool for a while and learning the basics, reading (or skimming) the documentation can teach me a lot.
In my opinion, you should try to avoid that. I know, most of the times you can't but in any case try not to mix the new language with the old one, and never add to the mixture old habits, practices and patterns.
Always try to find resources that will help you get through the new language in the way the language works, not in the way other languages do; that will never have a happy ending, and if it does it will be very hard to modify it to the right way.
Cheers.
Yes I have.
I mean, is there another way? The only language I ever learned that was not on a project was ABC basic, which was what you used on my first computer.
I would recommend if you start with a certain language, stick with it. I only say that because many times in the past I tried more and more different ones, and the one I started out with was the best :D
Everytime I have/want to learn a new language, I force myself to find something to code.
But to be sure I did it well, I always want to be able to check my code and what it ouputs.
To do so, I just try to do the same kind of stuff with languages I know and to compare the outputs. For that, I created a little project (hosted on Github) with an exercise sheet and the correction for every language I learnt. It's a good way to learn in my opinion because it gives you a real little project.
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I've been programming for several years now and since then I have learned several concepts and techniques that have made me a better programmer (i.e. OOP, MVC, regex, hashing, etc). I feel too that by been able to learn several languages (basic, pascal, C/C++, lisp, prolog, python) I have widen my horizons in a very possitive way. But since some time ago I feel like I'm not learning any new good "trick". Can you suggest some interesting concept/technique/trick that could make me retake the learning flow?
A good paradigm shift always allows you to see things differently and become a better developer. I would suggest you read up on functional programming and maybe learn a functional language like Haskell or Scheme.
YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) and DTSTTCPW (Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work)
It's easy to spend a lot of time thinking about edge cases, and find that you've implemented something that's completely useless. I believe that a far better approach is to knock out a simple prototype, and then poke and prod it until you understand the domain well enough to create production code.
Recognize, however, that your prototype is going to evolve into production code whether you like it or not. So write it with that in mind.
Learning how to use your IDE and tools. This to me resulted in a far greater productivity increase.
For examples:
learning how to use a source level debugger
using tools like purify/boundschecker
fxcop
etc. I realize I am dating myself, but those were big steps. There are many more.
Any time you can change the way you think about a problem or solve a problem without having to undo previous work is HUGE gain. Process, tools, etc all can help with that. Don't limit yourself to finding silver bullet techniques for productivity gains.
Watching productive people work and getting them to tell you what they are doing and why is also invaluable.
If I'm honest, using, and learning a great framework like .NET has really increased my productivity.
I'm often amazed what people are willing to reinvent due to their ignorance that the very same function already exists in the framework.
AGILE and especially Test Driven Development. Best thing to happen to software development since the invention of Object Oriented Design.
Concerning coding, I'd say design patterns and architecture patterns are always nice to look at and can help you write cleaner/better code.
For methodology I would advice Agile development that is great. There are a numerous number of techniques and methods (I'm personally fan of extreme programming) and reading that can keep you busy and improve your general approach.
Finally I'd say learn new languages like Ruby
Design patterns
SCRUM process
DiSC assessment (and understanding of how it applies to collaborative s/w development)
StackOverflow.com (of course!)
Google
... other stuff too, I'm sure
Design Patterns. Learning how to break dependence upon implementation and inheritance, and depending on interfaces (contracts) instead changed the way I think about programming.
Debugging. Once I figured out how to actually step through the code and go line-by-line, examining the underlying state, it revolutionized how I troubleshoot code.
Practice, practice practice: I didn't realize how important it is to keep working on my skills apart from work until a relatively short time ago. Mistakes and solutions I make at home make me a better programmer at work, and vice a versa. Learning should never stop if you want to be good at something, and programming isn't an exception.
If I had to pick just one, I'd say Test-Driven Design, aka TDD: write unit tests (and check that they fail) before you incrementally add features.
Try to learn to see things from the user's standpoint.
For example:
learn how to write meaningful error messages
learn how to produce usable applications
learn some basic speed-optimization techniques
Remember that the user sees your application, not your code.
VIM Quick Reference Card. After I started using advanced vim (macros, plugins) I have stopped doing any repetitive actions during coding manually.
Apart from that, Scrum and working at night, when noone interrupts You gave me the highest benefit.
If you want to expand your experience into web programming, you should try and get a good handle on the HTTP Request/Response paradigm. This will make creating web apps much easier on you because you understand the underlying framework.
(http)://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol
I would look at some of the newer languages that combine OO and functional elements, like C# or Scala.
Learning Smalltalk has helped me become more productive. It is an easy language to learn and things can be built extremely quickly. For a stunning productivity aid check out Seaside, it's a framework for building web applications. Moreover, if you have only been used to curly brace languages Smalltalk will also make you smile!
I was helped by the following paradigms in this order:
1) bottom-up programming
2) top-down programming (C, Pascal)
3) object-oriented programming (Smalltalk, Java)
4) functional programming (lisp, Mathematica)
with some logic programming thrown in (prolog).
nHibernate hands down. The fact that I dont need to write database functionality for my business objects is very useful and time saving.
High level understanding, creating good abstractions with proper dependencies, is what pays off in long term. For example, Law of Demeter is an important guideline. I recommend also reading Eric Evan's Domain Driven Design
Code generators. They're the best thing in software engineering.
Would you like to write all your projects in asm? Nope, let's generate it from C++. Or from something sat above the JVM which diligently generates the necessary machine code.
Duplicating the same source code all over the place, but stuck with a language that insists on the line noise? Use macros.
Want to use lambdas in a language that doesn't have them? Work out how to fake the anonymous name and variable scoping required then generate the boilerplate.
None of the readily available languages quite fit your pattern of thought, desired syntax or even semantics? Write a compiler for a new one.
Better languages are nice. Better design patterns are nice. Emacs is awesome. But compilers are where all the power lies in our field. I suspect the only reason they aren't mentioned in any of the other answers is that we can't imagine programming without any.
Copy/paste technique