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Building something and learning from your mistakes is indeed the best way to learn, but doing something ambitious in a language you don't really know means that

Building something and learning from your mistakes is indeed the best way to learn, but doing something ambitious in a language you don't really know means that you're going spend a lot of time on doing and re-doing the structure of it, and that requires a lot of patience since you'll get so little feedback. I'm a very impatient person, all the side-projects I've made have had very tight feedback loops, where you quickly get results and can change them and see your project grow. My first language on the side was PERL, which is a very unstructured get-stuff-done-fast kind of language which suited me perfectly at that time and was fun to learn, for me. Horses for courses, etc.

plinkplonk 17y ago
" but doing something ambitious in a language you don't really know " I never really implied "language you don't know". My advice was "use a language you know and build something ambitious" (vs trying to find the ultimate "cool" language). I'll edit. "Building something and learning from your mistakes is indeed the best way to learn," This is what I was trying to say, (with "something" != tiny programs). I know many people who "know" many languages(and try to know more) but haven't built anything substantial with any of them.