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Ask HN: What steps do you take in learning a new programming language?

What process do you follow to acquire and start using a new programming language? What exercises do you go through, or what experiments or programs do you implement ?

wglb 7y ago
First, I get the tools installed. Then, I follow an introductory tutorial, paying particular attention to the concepts that I am least familiar with, and doing any exercises that are part of the tutorial. I then pick an example of a problem that I know, such as parsing a log file, writing a lisp interpreter, a simple web server, maybe a problem or two from the Euler site. Picking a good tutorial can help a lot. For Python, I have both the introduction and the recipes book. Also, I try to read a lot of code from github.
Havoc 7y ago
[Amateur hour alert] I spend some time thinking about which version. Not a language, but recently - tensorflow. v1 has epic documentation but is about to die, v2 has no documentation but is the future. Made a conscious choice to accept pain & suffering by struggling with (temp) lack of support. Any type of new tech - I usually start by spinning up a Ubuntu VM. ...because I've realised something always goes horribly wrong on first attempt & I'll need to sh!tcan the VM. And second I like to try to push all the tech to latest beta (but not alpha/nightly). Not because I need the latest but because it lets me touch base with where the current community pain points/issues/thinking is. Emphasis on try. Noob attempting to roll with a beta of a tech he/she doesn't know is a very conscious & deliberate reach. >What exercises do you go through On the actual programming side - I make a bee line for the debugging equivalent of "print". It's all a black box to me until I can pipe output to something. >programs do you implement I find the classic example that is simple yet not hello world and dissect that. e.g. for ML the classic MNIST set. The code to get that to 90%+ accuracy is like 10 lines...you can dissect the hell out of that for understanding
rurban 7y ago
First I read all the documentation. Then I read the source code. Then I check some tutorials. Then I try it out with simple examples, nothing fancy.

What process do you follow to acquire and start using a new programming language? What exercises do you go through, or what experiments or programs do you implement ?

wglb 7y ago

First, I get the tools installed. Then, I follow an introductory tutorial, paying particular attention to the concepts that I am least familiar with, and doing any exercises that are part of the tutorial. I then pick an example of a problem that I know, such as parsing a log file, writing a lisp interpreter, a simple web server, maybe a problem or two from the Euler site. Picking a good tutorial can help a lot. For Python, I have both the introduction and the recipes book. Also, I try to read a lot of code from github.

Havoc 7y ago

[Amateur hour alert] I spend some time thinking about which version. Not a language, but recently - tensorflow. v1 has epic documentation but is about to die, v2 has no documentation but is the future. Made a conscious choice to accept pain & suffering by struggling with (temp) lack of support. Any type of new tech - I usually start by spinning up a Ubuntu VM. ...because I've realised something always goes horribly wrong on first attempt & I'll need to sh!tcan the VM. And second I like to try to push all the tech to latest beta (but not alpha/nightly). Not because I need the latest but because it lets me touch base with where the current community pain points/issues/thinking is. Emphasis on try. Noob attempting to roll with a beta of a tech he/she doesn't know is a very conscious & deliberate reach. >What exercises do you go through On the actual programming side - I make a bee line for the debugging equivalent of "print". It's all a black box to me until I can pipe output to something. >programs do you implement I find the classic example that is simple yet not hello world and dissect that. e.g. for ML the classic MNIST set. The code to get that to 90%+ accuracy is like 10 lines...you can dissect the hell out of that for understanding

rurban 7y ago

First I read all the documentation. Then I read the source code. Then I check some tutorials. Then I try it out with simple examples, nothing fancy.