Learning a programming language as an adult.

Post Reply New Topic

Learning a computer language is not the same thing as learning a natural language.

A person who knows how to formulate a computer algorithm by one means will have no problem learning other notations and jargons.

ruveyn

The abstractions can be obstacles because some people might take more time to understand what those abstractions actually mean in a practical sense. In that case they can be an obstacle. They're not useful until they can be understood in the practical sense.

Also, there really is no difference between one programming language and the other. The differences are ephemeral. To make a new programming language all you need to do is convert the new syntax to some pre-compiled C code and run it through gcc. Because in the end that's all you're doing, is turning text in to binary and C compilers happen to be the most efficient compilers around. The only meaning in the differences between languages exist in the minds of people since we don't think in binary and because we can't design one universal programming language. We break it down in to multiple languages to allow our minds to think about programming problems from different perspectives and to simplify certain tasks. But much of that could be avoided if we scrapped all computing legacy and started over. Because isn't that all it is? Simply creating a tool to make it easier to work with other tools which were designed for that same reason?

I'm a fisheries biologist but took a job that (unexpectedly) was entirely python programming. I had never even heard of python before, and had never done any programming of any sort. I've been working on it for about a month and a half and am now creating GUI's for image analysis and data processing.... it's sort of funny; I always wondered what my "special skill" was, and I think this may be it. It's definitely not like learning a "language"... I'm not really sure how to describe it. It's much more about learning patterns of concepts than memorizing anything. I love that when you break down something that seems so complicated, it's so simple and logical. I think that's why I've come to enjoy it so much....

Mmm, data + programming. Sounds like my kind of job .

I know; I've done both .

I'm in geek heaven I started off studying fish using sonar cameras, and that lead to this. I'd like to go farther with it on my own, eventually. The nice thing about programming (at least in python) is that once you understand the basics, you can just combine the basics and get more complex stuff that is still, at its core, basic. It's not like learning a language (I tried and failed miserably to learn Spanish) where you have present tense, past tense, partial tense, blah blah blah... and they're all (mostly) unrelated, etc. Programming is very intuitive for the kinds of brains Aspies have, it seems.

I'm not really a programer, but I used to tinker with C and Perl in the mid-90's. I dropped it as I didn't really have much of a need in my graphics work. Every now and then I've needed to write a bit of code for Flash or in Javascript, but only rarely. Recently I had a problem that I needed to solve and I suspected Perl would be the ideal language. I haven't touched Perl in many many years and at first I had to relearn some pretty basic things, but I was able to successfully solve the problem and add a few additional solutions to related problems.

At 31, you are still quite young, but even when you are 75, I would recommend picking up whatever new thing you are interested in. Actually I found some of the programing concepts far easier to understand now than I did when I was younger. Never assume that age limits your ability to learn and grow.

I'm now in my mid-forties, and have recently started learning R, which is more of an environment for handling large matrices of data. Open source, and popular in bioinformatics, similar to Matlab and S (both commercial). Small programs for standardized maths on tables can be developed.
The structure is quite different though from what I remember of various Pascal versions i worked with in my twenties. Problems can often be solved with for-next loops like in Pascal or Basic , but this should be avoided because they are very slow, there are specialized matrix functions instead. I still have a fight with it.
I wouldn't say though, that it is really more difficult than learning Pascal or Basic, when I was still in my teens, though. And there I had more formal training.

I've also used R.