Page 2 - What languages do you know?

Awesome crown, way to show the manager whose boss .

I'm not saying that you can't learn quickly, you obviously learn very quickly. I'm saying that in order to really know any language it does take time and effort. I don't think this can be argued with .

Lisp amplifies this effect because it approach is about as different as you can get, code is data is code. Everything is an expression. These things dramatically effects the flow of your programs so you can't carry over as much as your experience as you would when learning yet another X-like language.

I've been using Ruby for a day or two and I've accomplished every task I've set my mind to – porting some of my Python examples. Does this mean that I know Ruby? I don't think so but maybe you do .

Lisp aside presuming that a language can be "known" after minimal exposer is just wrong.

I'd say the point at which you know a language is when you start to think in that language – not the point at which you can apply what you know from other languages to piece something together.

On the VB front I can empathize; I used VB for the first time in college but after a few lessons I started to finish assignments quicker than anyone in the class, even those who'd taken IT courses before, and sometimes even the teacher.

I can't comment on ASP but VB isn't a hard language to learn if you have any prior programming experience . I'm not trying to belittle you're interview, I think thats awesome .

It just seems to me that too many programmers will read one or two articles, maybe a chapter of a book, a wiki-page maybe, never use a language or use it once and then walk around saying they know it .

As a consequence there code is very poor quality; what they know is incomplete; it's my opinion that if you know a language then your solutions will naturally be good ones. If there not then programming probably isn't for you.

These are my opinions anyway, enjoy .

Mark.

Oh I don't feel that learning ASP (ASP is to VB as JavaScript is to Java, kindof) in an interview was any great feat so no worries there.

I feel that there are three stages to learning anything, including programming.

1. The basics. This is the scratching the surface bit. At this point you can't claim to know anything about the subject. Just to be learning.
2. Familiarizing. This is learning how things work. Once you're familiar with it then you can say you know the subject. Like you say you should be able to think in that language.
3. Mastery. This is when you become an expert.

Most people who claim to know something actually know the basics, if anything. I never claim to know anything unless i'm familiar with it. And that takes time. I usually get there pretty quickly compared to most people I know. But no one is getting there overnight.

You didn't inclue COBOL or RPG? Pfft. What kind of poll is this?

Oh, but it's still a very cool: "Can you programming in X", "Not yet give me half an hour"... *jaw drops* .

Anyway that's a good way of looking at it and I agree entirely with what you've said. The problem as I see it is that most programmers doesn't seem to share this attitude and that has to be a bad thing.

The result is a culture of people thinking that they have nothing left to learn about subject Y; that they know about for example, Lisp, just because they've read that Lisp has high order functions, uses lots of parenthesis and supports recursion .

The basics as you called them.

Knowing the why and the how relating to these subjects is much harder and takes far longer than simply reading that they're available and deciding you know enough about them to move onto learning the basics of the next language .

I guess it's a good way to pad out your CV/Resume, but if your going to only learn the basics about something don't write it as if your fluent .

Take care all,

Mark.

The saddest thing is people who spend a year working with C++ and can't get the basics in a language like Java which is a C family language. I almost had a heart attack when someone with said experience in C++ said they didn't understand for loops in Java.

Hahahah, no! That's crazy but it does show that learning is a skill in itself . I personally can understand why someone with years of C experience under there belt wouldn't be able to pick Lisp up very easily but for loops are for loops are for loops in my experience*. Java as you said is from the same family and shares a lot of the same ideas anyway.

Maybe they only ever used while loops and so it's not really that they don't understand for in Java but that they don't understand it period?

*chuckling* thanks ,

Mark.

* In Python for is actually used to mean for-each but it doesn't look like a for loop anyway, it just uses the same keyword .

That's a possibility but the individual to which i refer to used for loops in c++ and had sat through a lecture which said that looping in java was the same as c++.

I'm no Java expert, I've only read a little about but maybe he was speaking of the enhanced for in Java? Other than that looping seemed to work the same to me, but then I haven't really looked into it all that much .

If I was going to use Java I'd probably be more inclined to use one of the Java bridges like Jython or JRuby etc.

The again there's a bunch of Scheme->Java compilers and interpreters that I've been looking at. Call it a personal preference but I wasn't to impressed by Java so I never pursued it .

Mark.

You're a good person trying to justfy this person not knowing. But this was not the case. Java 1.5 was still in beta at the time. And the standard for the class was 1.3.1. This was a case of a person who should have known something but didn't because of no other reason than their own inability to pay attention and do more than regurgitate information.