programmer rehab

Faced with the task of learning a new programming language (and its associated libraries) I was left considering what is the best way to do this effectively. I will now describe what I do, and by no means am I advocating its use, be aware of the hidden dangers that lie with it.

My first port of call is normally to try and see if some book on Amazon is the overwhelming favourite of the masses and purchase it. I must admit though, I often get the book, flick through it, and then probably ignore just about everything in it. I do however normally remember the name of the book and the author and when someone asks me if there is a book I recommend I spout this information to them. So the moral of this is probably never to ask me to recommend a book as I’m probably grossly misinformed about what is actually in it.

Anyway, in the first week of learning the language I will try to map the syntax of the language to concepts I know, i.e. object-orientation. This probably presents the first problem: what if the language is not really object-oriented? My solution, make it object-oriented 🙂 This can prove tiresome in certain languages, and JavaScript in particular. However I’m not one for letting this type of hurdle get in the way, and tend to find a way to do this (with JavaScript this was the module pattern described by Douglas Crockford). By the second week I’m normally getting pissed off with my lack of understanding of the language’s features. I think this in part stems from the fact that my style of coding appears to be a copy-paste based system. What I mean by this is that quite often at the start I won’t even bother learning how to say define a class – I will find it out once then just copy-paste the class definition in from another class and change the name. A similar process is then used for other language features (I must point out I’m not copy-pasting the code itself though, that’s just waaay too 80’s). So those first couple of classes and library calls can be like kicking smoking the crack pipe.

After this initial push though, it tends to get easier, I replace the crack induced cold turkey with a slightly more sociable nicotine based habit, but experience constant irritation at the need to stand out in the cold street whenever I want to spark up in public. At this stage I try to abstract most things away from the language itself and think more about how I can isolate change. In other words I tend to have the thought process where I ask myself, if someone asked me to change a requirement, how can I do it with just a change to one line; oh and preferably that one line I would have to change is at the top of the file so I don’t have to search through everything to find it. My motto is that not everyone cares enough to want to learn how something works and is happy if the process is simple and easy. Me, I prefer to waste a mountain of time trying to figure out every detail of how the code fits together – I really need to give up that pursuit, rehab or something. So at this point I start to trace into every language feature, not happy with it just working – tantamount to starting chain smoking. If I get through this stage then I will normally stick with the language, many however have fallen by the wayside after two weeks. More so learning specific frameworks though, as you start thinking “God I could do this far easier if I was writing ALL the code myself”. Remember if you get these thoughts they are normally bullshit though, try to ignore them, as you ARE wrong, you just don’t know it. It’s your mind trying to trick you out of a little hard work. All you will be is a hopeless quiter!

So only after I’ve kicked the crack pipe by weeding myself on to ciggies, and then developed a massive chain smoking habit, do I get the moment of enlightenment where I dump the ciggies and tag myself clean of any irritants (well apart from all those people who tell you that you have learned the wrong language, who all should go get a life). At this point I still occasionally use my copy-paste system described above but it’s becoming easier.

As I said at the beginning of this post I’m not sure this is the best way to go about this process. The main problem that I see is that I don’t learn all the language specific features (maybe this is a good thing). In most languages I work with a standard set of ideas that I apply to the specific language. This always leaves me thinking I could get more out of the language if I only pushed the boundaries a little further. For example, I always think that I’m not quite getting as much out of things like closures, lamdas, etc. I use these things but the way people rave about them I feel there must be more to it.

So that’s it. It usually takes me about a month or so to get comfortable with the language. I then use the language exclusively for around six months and then, for whatever reason, have to shift back to an old favourite which I have forgot how to use. So I dust down the crack pipe and seek out the Rizlas and start all over again……