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.. and here I'm having difficulty plodding through Scala... :-( I wonder what's the similarity between learning human languages, and computer languages. I thi
by discardorama 11y ago
.. and here I'm having difficulty plodding through Scala... :-(
I wonder what's the similarity between learning human languages, and computer languages. I think one can pick up a computer language fairly quickly if it's in the same paradigm (imperative, functional, logic, etc.)... but actually mastering it is much harder, because there are so many different ways to do ("say") the same thing.
- Bolt64 11y agoYou've got a valid point. It took me about a year to become really proficient in python, but after that a month to pick up C relatively well, and another 3 months to pick up Scala (probably because functional programming was something new to me). But after Scala, Haskell took about a week, so you might be on to something with similar paradigms being easier to pick up.
- schoen 11y agoOne significant difference is that programming languages have a very small vocabulary, while spoken languages usually have an enormous vocabulary. A programming language might have 10-20 reserved words (plus specific meanings of tokens like "++", "\", ":=" that you need to learn). On the other hand, yesterday I realized that I didn't know the word for "brick" in any foreign language, including languages I've studied and regularly used for a long time. That's one factor that makes it plausible that a programmer would learn a new programming language in a weekend, but somewhat implausible that someone would learn a spoken language in a weekend (although you can get surprisingly far). On the other hand, Daniel Tammet apparently learned Icelandic in one week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet#Savantism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet#Savantism