Other Do you want to learn 12 or just 8 programming languages next year?

...boy, I was happy if I would learn two per year 😂

The idea ain't new.
The first time I read about it was in A. Hunt, D. Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer - from journeyman to master

On the one hand it's absolutely right. Of course you improve yourself by learning new languages. Any new language you learn add more ways of thinking - doesn't matter if it's a programming language, or a natural language.
On the other hand: What means 'learning a language'?
All beginners classes mostly introduce you to the syntax only. I recall what my driving teacher told me:"Having a driving license doesn't mean you can drive. Only lots of driving teaches you that."
Anyway you learn more, so better suiting languages for certain problems, yes. And you better always chose the language fits best for a certain task. But go and tell @$JOB, that the chosen language was not the best choice, better was to use language XYZ...😁

I have a list of what additionally programming languages to me make sense to learn, so I want to learn them. But I still don't get even started on #1 on my list I figured out to be most important for me to learn first: lisp
But I always find myself either confronted with the need to get deeper in what I already thought I knew, or get 'distracted' by finding I just need to learn another one first to solve a current problem.
So, recently I needed to put lisp on parking position again, while currently I start to get into awk. 😎
 
In my entire career (& before then, school) I have used less than 20 languages (meaning written at least one non-trivial program). I learned most of them out of curiosity and only later a job fell in my lap where that paid for writing code in such a language!
Maturin said:
But I still don't get even started on #1 on my list I figured out to be most important for me to learn first: lisp
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You can motivate yourself by reading a book where Lisp is used heavily. May be this will help: https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog/blob/main/LEARN.md
May be cracauer@ can suggest some!
 
ASM to decode and integrity check JPEG and similar image files.

Converting between big and small endian is a breeze in ASM.

Xchg AH, AL
ROR EAX,16
Xchg AH,AL

The signatures are best read as sequential bytes which bypasses any endian issues.

Searching the IFDs is straight forward in ASM.

The end result is extracting the creation date from EXIF and setting the file time stamps to the same.

This is part of a big data recovery job that started out with two million file fragments.
 
bakul said:
You can motivate yourself by reading a book where Lisp is used heavily. May be this will help: https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog/blob/main/LEARN.md
May be cracauer@ can suggest some!
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Thanks. My problem ain't to know books about lisp. I already have a list of the most recommended standard works, and some I also already possess (anyway I bookmarked your link. Thanks for that, too.)
One of my major problems is I spend too much time in the forums. 😂
 
PMc there is a world of difference between a coding job, a code monkey house and a software engineering company. One should seek a job in an engineering environment, not some project churn-out human burnout factory.

In my city, those bad jobs count up only to 10-15% I guess, I'm just leaving that as security margin because I'm not aware of any of them.
 
mer said:
I know what I know now (C/C++) and have Stack Overflow for everything else.
Learning a language (programming or human) is typically done as a need. "I'm going to italy so I need to learn Italian" or "Job requires Rust, so I need to learn Rust".
Now learning a programming language is often relatively easy, because it's just syntax. Being able to write code that compiles is baby step one. Writing code that actually does complex stuff is way beyond that baby step.
Human language equivalent:
"May I have a beer, please" vs a conversation about Venetian philosophy during the 1300's
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I whole heartedly agree. Learning the principles are the largest hurdle, and how they apply towards a need. From there choosing the language that accommodates the need to then learn the syntax is the way to go. `C` and `C++` principles are transferable everywhere, but it is the libraries and dictionaries that make the languages more convoluted, and the syntax should be the afterthought, especially in the context of AI nonsense. Learning the algorithms (even if they are intuitive) is what takes more time.
 
Zare said:
Mostly all 'classic' developers are self taught after all...
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I think relying on another to teach a language is only good for learning principles, but moving towards understanding is a series of failures to learn what actually works, to then gain a renewed appreciation as to why things are the way they are.
 
ruby R53 said:
i'm self-taught on
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There is no other way to become better on writing than to write, to teach yourself.
Books on the topic, some advanced classes, and reading other's work of course help in some way, but after all it's up you alone to get experience, which you can only gain by doing it yourself. :cool:
 
ruby R53 said:
exactly, the only thing that's missing here is motivation to learn more consistently
i seldom make programs from scratch so i learn it pretty slowly
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Yeah it helps when you have a need to reach a goal. A desire isn't enough for some of us. Learning how to program a database was a lot more interesting to me once I had a need cause I never had a desire. In fact, learning how to set up a server wasn't a desire till I had the need years ago.

Right now I'm busy with other things but there is a desire to eventually learn Lisp better and a couple of other things but I have no need so such things just aren't moving along. It's not a priority because (perhaps) I'm motivated by financial income or sometimes fun with programming something.

There is nothing fun for me to program at the moment but creating something that gives me financial income is fun.
 
Zare said:
PMc there is a world of difference between a coding job, a code monkey house and a software engineering company. One should seek a job in an engineering environment, not some project churn-out human burnout factory.
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Hm. Tell me more.
I for my part tried the code producing thing once, and I found it unsatisfying (the expectation was not just eggs from the cage-kept hen, it was rather golden eggs).
Consequentially I for my part then found something a lot more appealing to me: operating unix at largs-scale, maintaining high availability and safety, planning the compute centers, managing the projects. That one also comes with a few specific perks on one side or the other (especially when you do it for some very big banks), but otherwise it was real fun, for twenty years. Then, at the 20th employment anniversary, I got - fired. Bottomline: technical and project expertise is no longer of any value in the IT-business. All technical and project people were fired, only the business consultants stayed.

So, as I understand it, the jobs remaining available now are those of the cage-kept hens, in order to produce something that the business analysts can make money with.

Basically, I made a mistake. From my very youth I never spent a single thought on how to get a job or how to earn money. Since age 14 I had decided to only do what I for my part consider fun. And since that fun was electronics first and computer networks later on, my idea was that in case the need would arise, there would always be some opportunity to earn money with those skills. Apparently I was wrong.
 
Maturin said:
And, what I better shall do is reduce distraction. :cool:
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Distractions have always been there but it is much worse now where most everything in the "social" media is screaming for your attention! If you can focus your attention on things *you* want, that is half the battle won! This is why books like Carl Newport's "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" are popular. But it is the same thing. You can't change your behavior by simply reading a book. You have to practice until you get it right or internalize it and for that you need self-motivation and/or self-discipline. Or else it is just another book distracting you! And if you have self-motivation/discipline, you don't need books like that, which basically says allocate some distraction free time regularly to focus on things of highest value to you!
 
PMc said:
Since age 14 I had decided to only do what I for my part consider fun. And since that fun was electronics first and computer networks later on, my idea was that in case the need would arise, there would always be some opportunity to earn money with those skills. Apparently I was wrong.
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I am sad to hear that. For me it has worked out somehow, a rather fun career. I had worked one month after college as a Microsoft developer. I closed couple of tasks, shook hands with the owner, took a monthly pay and never tried that experiment again.

Just last month I had a buddy leave my company because he got a job at a state electric corporation. He is an EE, not an SE, and he was hired because EE jobs at that time were sparse, while they know how to program, and we can always use any good engineer. Spent couple of years with us and now he's moving to his thing - he told to me, Zare, I'd rather sit in a dark room soldering boards all day long then think about somebody's stupid business problems and how to model them in the code.

And I completely agree.
 
Ok so degreed EE but been doing SWE pretty much the last 40 yrs. Software can be quick, easy to get a result. Hardware takes longer. So what did I wind up? mostly OS level stuff. OS level you need to understand hardware, but be able to translate SW to "do the right thing". I get frustrated at UI/UX software.
 
Classroom teaching and passing exams gives you some initial familiarity, but you really need to work on a real project or two that you can get your teeth stuck into, to learn much about programming; that's when it starts to "sink in". Best of all is to work in a team of other good people with different levels of experience and expertise, and learn from each other by doing real work solving complex problems. Of course this isn't unusual or unique to programming, most acquired skills work like this, in science, engineering, the arts... etc. And teaching other people ... explaining things to other people... also teaches the person doing the explaining.:)
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Yeah it helps when you have a need to reach a goal. A desire isn't enough for some of us. Learning how to program a database was a lot more interesting to me once I had a need cause I never had a desire. In fact, learning how to set up a server wasn't a desire till I had the need years ago.
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yeah that's even how my most sophisticated project was born xd
i'm still developing it and it's quite fun to learn from my overlookings
 
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