6 ms·

Here We Go Again: Why Is It Difficult for Developers to Learn Another Prog Lang?

29 points by matt_d 7y ago

lidHanteyk 7y ago
This line from the abstract is the key takeaway for me: > The interviews revealed that programmers make failed attempts to relate a new programming language with what they already know. This is the map-territory problem. Folks think that they know the territory (computation) because they know a map (one particular language). I find it telling that some programmers explicitly used cheat sheets to literally map their understanding from one map of the territory to another. Folks are too quick to think that something is alien just because they do not understand it. A moment's reflection will assure us that every programming language ever used by people has also been invented by people. The feeling of alienation that folks have upon encountering a new language is entirely only a feeling, although understandably perhaps fear of the unknown is the most fundamental fear [0]. I personally know about a half-dozen languages for my daily work, and I suspect that that is also the case for most other programmers; I am not the sort of person that learns new languages for no reason. But the paper only shows small slices of each investigated programmer's thought processes, because it only shows one or two old languages for each new language being learned. I wonder to what degree there are common languages that are used perhaps as linguafranca (e.g. that two-thirds of us know JS and two-fifths know Python [1]) or for the ambient semantics of computation (e.g. that most programs are written with C's behavior in mind). [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0887618516300469?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088761851... [1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > A moment's reflection will assure us that every programming language ever used by people has also been invented by people. Not at all. We produce chemicals by splicing the code to produce them into bacteria, culturing the bacteria, and harvesting the chemical. This is obviously an application of programming, and just as obviously uses a language not invented by people. We use it anyway, mostly by application of copy-and-paste.
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago
    Okay, so the contention is that humans did not invent the design of DNA, and thus we did not invent programming with DNA. However, we invented animal husbandry several millennia before finding the structure of DNA, and we invented the concept of genetics to discuss and manipulate traits a century before we isolated DNA's low-level structure. Even today, knowing how DNA works, we usually program at the level of genes; see e.g. [0] where a Youtuber is doing genetic manipulation and programming. This is the same sort of map-territory situation [1] as in my original post. The RNA World [2] is the territory, and genetics is our map. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/TheChemlife/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/TheChemlife/videos [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world
- chubot 7y ago
  The interviews revealed that programmers make failed attempts to relate a new programming language with what they already know. I've seen this a lot in shell code while working on Oil [1]. For example, ${array} means ${array[0]} in bash and ksh-derived shells. That is, if you don't put an index on array, it evaluates to the first element in an array. This is a weird semantic that basically no other language has. And it's been true for decades, and is documented. But people still report bugs about it on the bash mailing list (I saw on a few days ago). I got rid of this behavior in Oil for exactly that reason, along with fixing tons of other warts, while remaining compatible. You can opt back in with 'shopt --set compat_array'. Another issue is using (a; b) to mean grouping when { a; b; } is technically more correct. () starts a subshell in addition to doing grouping. You wouldn't really know unless you mutate a variable in the group -- it will show up in one case but not the other. The wart where ; is required before } and not ) doesn't help. --- So shell is full of surprises, and Oil is meant to be more comfortable for programmers coming from say Python, JS, or Ruby. People bring those expectations to shell, and they get frustrated with it. [1] http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.ht...
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    > The wart where ; is required before } and not ) doesn't help. Also the spaces are required between the {} and commands in Bash which is another brainclunk to deal with.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think there is a fallacy that people can pick up a new language in short time. If you know C, you will write C code in the new language for a while. It takes quite a while to pick up the new concepts. Good documentation geared towards experienced developers would be very helpful.
- rileymat2 7y ago
  It depends on your approach, if you try to learn the idioms as part of the learning process as opposed to just syntax, you can prevent this.
  - bsder 7y ago
    Yes and no. Learning Rust is a good example. Sure, you can learn the borrow checker and other stuff fairly easily. Patterns are fine. Error checking was a bit more iffy before "?". And then you try to build a doubly linked list and the language fights you at every single turn. (for good reason, but it fights you nonetheless). Nobody expects that. That's the kind of thing that languages often aren't good at documenting.
    - Royalaid 7y ago
      Personally I see this a lot in normal interview style questions. They are geared towards an imperative approach, find this thing in a 2d matrix based on some way of manipulating the indexes is a common example. If you try a functional approach it is possible but often times akward or super dense looking code much like the double linked list example above. I feel like this comes from the fact that while languages are extremely easy to bend into a shape that fits the problem and take a long time to learn so it's often easier for programmers to put out a bad solution instead trying to get the problem and the language to meet in the middle.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
flashgordon 7y ago
Actually - Is it?
codyswann 7y ago
This isn't my experience at all. The only talent developers who I have encountered who have learning another programming language are those who don't want to learn it. JavaScript being a great example. I know a lot of developers who would rather spend hours picking about the language itself, rather than just learning how to use it. This is mainly older developers, in my experience, who have seen "the hot new thing" many times in their career, so they no longer want to put in the effort to learn something new - instead choosing to explain why it's a fad.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  It is very easy to become jaded about the continuous onslaught of new technologies. However the flaws in JavaScript are right there, in your face as soon as you start using it.
- bsder 7y ago
  To be fair, web programming isn't programming in Javascript. Instead, it's programming FrameworkDuJour(tm) in Javascript. And the half-life of that is measured in months. So, the longer someone can drag their heels on learning FrameworkDuJour(tm), the better off they are. You can know Javascript cold and still be useless at web programming.
  - ryandvm 7y ago
    This is sooo true. By staying on the back-end for a few years, I managed to avoid front-end JavaScript long enough to watch Angular come and go. Unfortunately, React has had quite a bit more staying power and I ended up having to pick up some proficiency with it. That said, the ecosystem evolves enough that no two projects ever seem to use the same tooling.
    - codyswann 7y ago
      This is kind of my point. Instead of just accepting that web programming is rapidly evolving, a developer just says "I'm not going to learn this". And that's completely fine. It's definitely a choice. What I'm saying is that it's not difficult to learn. It's a cognizant choice that learning isn't worth the effort.
rramadass 7y ago
Interesting. I think there are more factors at play here. Learning a new language has a definite "cognitive cost". One issue is the perception of banality/drudgery i.e. lack of excitement/motivation involved in learning a language which is not too different (computation modelwise) from what you already know. As an example, having worked with C/C++ for a long time i just cannot summon the motivation to learn Python/JS etc. They are "boring". The constant comparison of features/syntactic sugar soon becomes tiresome. And subconsciously you feel that the effort/payoff ratio is not worth it until external circumstances force a change (eg. a new project requiring the language). I think it is better to be fluent in one or two languages so that you can focus on the problem without bothering about other incidental complexities. The only time where the effort in learning a new language is worth it is when you learn a new model of computation/thinking that expands your mind (eg. Erlang, Haskell, Mozart/Oz)
BerislavLopac 7y ago
This article is another great take on this topic: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/learning-a-language/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/learning-a-language/
dr-detroit 7y ago
Most people don't learn data structures & algorithms. It has nothing to do with language. Most developers lose their MIND if you suggest a new LIBRARY (or framework, if you dare speak aloud such evil). I hate to say it but career success is all about bragging yourself up and so I rarely interact with reasonably well rounded developers just people who know a little syntax in 1 language blow my bragging skills out of the water.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
I switched from C++ to Java at one point in my career (fortunately long in the past). I remember sweating after several hours of trying to put my head in the different environment, coming home shaking and exhausted. After 2 weeks it got better, and I think I got pretty good at it. The good news: switching back to C++ took only a few days, no sweating. It was 2 days before I remembered about header files, and thought "What the hell? Oh yeah" but that was about it.
SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
IMO, most of the difficulty comes due to developers having full-time jobs programming in languages they already know. Learning a new language takes a few weeks of focused effort, then a few months of practice using the language almost exclusively to really solidify it. That's almost never possible while employed: most employers aren't paying their developers to spend weeks-months to learn a new language they aren't already using. It's only in extreme cases where a business decides to change for some reason that they'll pay for the training and require devs to take the time to learn & practice. It does happen (my employer did this, swapped the backend from Java to Go, and paid every dev, even non-backend devs, to take training) but it's rare and expensive so there needs to be a very good reason for it. Many developers (if not most, I have no real data) don't program much outside work, and even if they do they'll keep going back to work and reinforcing the existing language's style in their minds. It takes time and effort. Maybe not a whole ton of time, especially if the languages are of similar paradigm (OO, functional, procedural, etc), but that's time and effort many wouldn't want to put in on their own.
bradknowles 7y ago
Why is it difficult for any human being to learn another language?
jbirer 7y ago
Pay me and I will learn.

29 points by matt_d 7y ago

This line from the abstract is the key takeaway for me: > The interviews revealed that programmers make failed attempts to relate a new programming language with what they already know. This is the map-territory problem. Folks think that they know the territory (computation) because they know a map (one particular language). I find it telling that some programmers explicitly used cheat sheets to literally map their understanding from one map of the territory to another. Folks are too quick to think that something is alien just because they do not understand it. A moment's reflection will assure us that every programming language ever used by people has also been invented by people. The feeling of alienation that folks have upon encountering a new language is entirely only a feeling, although understandably perhaps fear of the unknown is the most fundamental fear [0]. I personally know about a half-dozen languages for my daily work, and I suspect that that is also the case for most other programmers; I am not the sort of person that learns new languages for no reason. But the paper only shows small slices of each investigated programmer's thought processes, because it only shows one or two old languages for each new language being learned. I wonder to what degree there are common languages that are used perhaps as linguafranca (e.g. that two-thirds of us know JS and two-fifths know Python [1]) or for the ambient semantics of computation (e.g. that most programs are written with C's behavior in mind). [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0887618516300469?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088761851... [1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> A moment's reflection will assure us that every programming language ever used by people has also been invented by people. Not at all. We produce chemicals by splicing the code to produce them into bacteria, culturing the bacteria, and harvesting the chemical. This is obviously an application of programming, and just as obviously uses a language not invented by people. We use it anyway, mostly by application of copy-and-paste.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  Okay, so the contention is that humans did not invent the design of DNA, and thus we did not invent programming with DNA. However, we invented animal husbandry several millennia before finding the structure of DNA, and we invented the concept of genetics to discuss and manipulate traits a century before we isolated DNA's low-level structure. Even today, knowing how DNA works, we usually program at the level of genes; see e.g. [0] where a Youtuber is doing genetic manipulation and programming. This is the same sort of map-territory situation [1] as in my original post. The RNA World [2] is the territory, and genetics is our map. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/TheChemlife/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/TheChemlife/videos [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world
chubot 7y ago
The interviews revealed that programmers make failed attempts to relate a new programming language with what they already know. I've seen this a lot in shell code while working on Oil [1]. For example, ${array} means ${array[0]} in bash and ksh-derived shells. That is, if you don't put an index on array, it evaluates to the first element in an array. This is a weird semantic that basically no other language has. And it's been true for decades, and is documented. But people still report bugs about it on the bash mailing list (I saw on a few days ago). I got rid of this behavior in Oil for exactly that reason, along with fixing tons of other warts, while remaining compatible. You can opt back in with 'shopt --set compat_array'. Another issue is using (a; b) to mean grouping when { a; b; } is technically more correct. () starts a subshell in addition to doing grouping. You wouldn't really know unless you mutate a variable in the group -- it will show up in one case but not the other. The wart where ; is required before } and not ) doesn't help. --- So shell is full of surprises, and Oil is meant to be more comfortable for programmers coming from say Python, JS, or Ruby. People bring those expectations to shell, and they get frustrated with it. [1] http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.ht...
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  > The wart where ; is required before } and not ) doesn't help. Also the spaces are required between the {} and commands in Bash which is another brainclunk to deal with.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I think there is a fallacy that people can pick up a new language in short time. If you know C, you will write C code in the new language for a while. It takes quite a while to pick up the new concepts. Good documentation geared towards experienced developers would be very helpful.

rileymat2 7y ago
It depends on your approach, if you try to learn the idioms as part of the learning process as opposed to just syntax, you can prevent this.
- bsder 7y ago
  Yes and no. Learning Rust is a good example. Sure, you can learn the borrow checker and other stuff fairly easily. Patterns are fine. Error checking was a bit more iffy before "?". And then you try to build a doubly linked list and the language fights you at every single turn. (for good reason, but it fights you nonetheless). Nobody expects that. That's the kind of thing that languages often aren't good at documenting.
  - Royalaid 7y ago
    Personally I see this a lot in normal interview style questions. They are geared towards an imperative approach, find this thing in a 2d matrix based on some way of manipulating the indexes is a common example. If you try a functional approach it is possible but often times akward or super dense looking code much like the double linked list example above. I feel like this comes from the fact that while languages are extremely easy to bend into a shape that fits the problem and take a long time to learn so it's often easier for programmers to put out a bad solution instead trying to get the problem and the language to meet in the middle.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

flashgordon 7y ago

Actually - Is it?

codyswann 7y ago

This isn't my experience at all. The only talent developers who I have encountered who have learning another programming language are those who don't want to learn it. JavaScript being a great example. I know a lot of developers who would rather spend hours picking about the language itself, rather than just learning how to use it. This is mainly older developers, in my experience, who have seen "the hot new thing" many times in their career, so they no longer want to put in the effort to learn something new - instead choosing to explain why it's a fad.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
It is very easy to become jaded about the continuous onslaught of new technologies. However the flaws in JavaScript are right there, in your face as soon as you start using it.
bsder 7y ago
To be fair, web programming isn't programming in Javascript. Instead, it's programming FrameworkDuJour(tm) in Javascript. And the half-life of that is measured in months. So, the longer someone can drag their heels on learning FrameworkDuJour(tm), the better off they are. You can know Javascript cold and still be useless at web programming.
- ryandvm 7y ago
  This is sooo true. By staying on the back-end for a few years, I managed to avoid front-end JavaScript long enough to watch Angular come and go. Unfortunately, React has had quite a bit more staying power and I ended up having to pick up some proficiency with it. That said, the ecosystem evolves enough that no two projects ever seem to use the same tooling.
  - codyswann 7y ago
    This is kind of my point. Instead of just accepting that web programming is rapidly evolving, a developer just says "I'm not going to learn this". And that's completely fine. It's definitely a choice. What I'm saying is that it's not difficult to learn. It's a cognizant choice that learning isn't worth the effort.

rramadass 7y ago

Interesting. I think there are more factors at play here. Learning a new language has a definite "cognitive cost". One issue is the perception of banality/drudgery i.e. lack of excitement/motivation involved in learning a language which is not too different (computation modelwise) from what you already know. As an example, having worked with C/C++ for a long time i just cannot summon the motivation to learn Python/JS etc. They are "boring". The constant comparison of features/syntactic sugar soon becomes tiresome. And subconsciously you feel that the effort/payoff ratio is not worth it until external circumstances force a change (eg. a new project requiring the language). I think it is better to be fluent in one or two languages so that you can focus on the problem without bothering about other incidental complexities. The only time where the effort in learning a new language is worth it is when you learn a new model of computation/thinking that expands your mind (eg. Erlang, Haskell, Mozart/Oz)

BerislavLopac 7y ago

This article is another great take on this topic: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/learning-a-language/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/learning-a-language/

dr-detroit 7y ago

Most people don't learn data structures & algorithms. It has nothing to do with language. Most developers lose their MIND if you suggest a new LIBRARY (or framework, if you dare speak aloud such evil). I hate to say it but career success is all about bragging yourself up and so I rarely interact with reasonably well rounded developers just people who know a little syntax in 1 language blow my bragging skills out of the water.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

I switched from C++ to Java at one point in my career (fortunately long in the past). I remember sweating after several hours of trying to put my head in the different environment, coming home shaking and exhausted. After 2 weeks it got better, and I think I got pretty good at it. The good news: switching back to C++ took only a few days, no sweating. It was 2 days before I remembered about header files, and thought "What the hell? Oh yeah" but that was about it.

SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago

IMO, most of the difficulty comes due to developers having full-time jobs programming in languages they already know. Learning a new language takes a few weeks of focused effort, then a few months of practice using the language almost exclusively to really solidify it. That's almost never possible while employed: most employers aren't paying their developers to spend weeks-months to learn a new language they aren't already using. It's only in extreme cases where a business decides to change for some reason that they'll pay for the training and require devs to take the time to learn & practice. It does happen (my employer did this, swapped the backend from Java to Go, and paid every dev, even non-backend devs, to take training) but it's rare and expensive so there needs to be a very good reason for it. Many developers (if not most, I have no real data) don't program much outside work, and even if they do they'll keep going back to work and reinforcing the existing language's style in their minds. It takes time and effort. Maybe not a whole ton of time, especially if the languages are of similar paradigm (OO, functional, procedural, etc), but that's time and effort many wouldn't want to put in on their own.

bradknowles 7y ago

Why is it difficult for any human being to learn another language?

jbirer 7y ago

Pay me and I will learn.