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0 pointsvbezhenar1y ago0 comments

I'm long time programmer and I learned quite a lot of languages along the way. 20 years ago I programmed Perl and I spent some time learning its quirks. While some of that knowledge definitely helped me all these years, especially regular expressions, I wouldn't write a single Perl line without Googling today.

So learning syntax nuances of yet another programming language which I'll forget soon is wasted time. There's some "fundamental" knowledge, like understanding what functional value is, but the specific syntax that Python invented for lambda - that's not something valuable when I use Python few times a year.

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YeGoblynQueenne1y ago

I agree that learning syntactic nuances is not that useful, but it's something that comes naturally from contact with the language.

Rereading your comment I think I got the wrong impression from it. You said:

>> I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it

And I focused more on "I don't want to spend time to better learn it" than on "I don't really use it often". I also don't use Python often and I have to look up its syntax, same with e.g. R. I guess in that case it makes sense to not spend too much time learning the ins and outs of a language. On the other hand, Python is a staple, like Java was back in the day, and Perl and so on. It's useful, like speaking English. I don't think I would ever feel comfortable saying "I don't want to learn" it; or anything else.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsvbezhenar1y ago0 comments

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YeGoblynQueenne1y ago

I agree that learning syntactic nuances is not that useful, but it's something that comes naturally from contact with the language.

Rereading your comment I think I got the wrong impression from it. You said:

>> I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse