In the course of my web-surfing about, I found this interesting post by Joel Spolsky.
“The Perils of JavaSchools”
I’ve never been formally educated on a computing thing in my life :. Having seen code by someone that was, whom I’d like to strangle… Some times I wonder if I should keep it that way >_>. I would still very much like to one day pursue a masters, an excuse to (hopefully) learn more then I can solo. But honestly, the odds of ever being free to do so are quite slim.
I still remember starting out in C++ for the first time, and having a problem handling the syntax for simple statements:
if (foo < bar)
do_bar();
if (bar < foo) {
do_foo();
do_bar();
}
At the time, it was actually the most complex thing I’d ever had to learn. After figuring out that the curly brace was only required if there was more then one line, the rest was easy as pie. Once the simple logic was sorted out, I never had a problem like that learning another language.
But, that’s why I’ve come to look on learning a language differently then learning to write programs. A language has a syntax, how do you express something in written form? Through the languages syntax. One of the things that I love about C, is that for better or worse. You can cram the entire language syntax into your head. It’s really that small and light, that leaves a lot more room for working on a problem and not feeling: “Oh, I didn’t know I could write it like that” later on.
Actually creating a workable program is a bit different, it’s not a question of how you may write it (e.g. if (expr) { do; } or if expr: do), but how do you write it? One of the big joys of programming for me, is to sit back and try to figure out how to solve the problem. That’s the fun thing (y).