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Never Feel Safe

Apr 21, 2011

never feel safe

While reflecting on the virtue of learning multiple programming languages, each instantiating different paradigms, I came to the conclusion that there is value in feeling out of sorts. Conflict in oneself and against the forces of confusion is essential for advancing one’s technical skills and learning humility in the face of seemingly insurmountable complexities.

Learning another language is great. Learning another ten is better. Learning a paradigm is superb. Learning another dozen is sublime. Dynamic? Static? Phooey!

Never become comfortable.

Never feel safe.

:F

4 Comments, Comment or Ping

  1. Julian Morrison

    OK, then, I challenge you to learn J. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)

  2. Challenge accepted.

  3. Minor typo – s/confortable/comfortable/

  4. I appreciate that you appear to be part of the Teaching/Encouragement school of programming rather than the Closed-Club, You-can-never-learn-this school, a school I once unhappily attended, but successfully hurdled.

    It is currently unlikely — though not impossible — that Clojure will be implemented in our municipal IT setting, but that could have been true about Python before last year, so who knows. Our water department needs a lot of analysis since our new AMR system went in to collect reads. Clojure seems like a good fit.

    Again, thanks for your posts and enthusiasm.

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