Learning programming languages you don't like 💢

Sometimes, you may need to learn a new language for a new project or to build something that is only possible in that specific language. In these cases, it is important to focus on learning the basics of the language and its syntax. You can then use this knowledge to build your project or create the desired thing..

While it can be frustrating to switch up and write code in a new style, as a software engineer or developer, your main focus should be on building things, not on how to build them or what to use to build them.

The Newbie Developer 😕

Being an efficient developer is being a smart developer, you will realize this with time and by creating more and more things, it could take you some time to realize that hating on language is not a great idea.

I started with python and then javascript this helped me learn the functional programming paradigm but, I was hesitant to look to the other side of object oriented programming style, the more articles I read the more I hated using other languages, so being in this shell of a 'favourite' programming language is not a great idea and it stops you from learning new things.

The Efficient Programmer 🤓

'You do not need to learn everything' or lets rephrase it 'You don't need to remember everything you learn' everyone forgets things with time, the experience of doing it right matters most than memorizing it.

The basic concepts  of programming is same everywhere the only thing that changes are concepts and the big demon 'syntax', sometimes it will be indentations and sometimes it will be braces, you'll just have to cope up with that.

The Getting started stage 👾

When starting with a new language always install the compiler and development kit locally and if possible do it on linux, doing this helps you later and you will get familiar on how exactly the code is executed, this saves a lot of time while trying to debug a simple compiler error.

Start with the reading the docs and try each example exercise that is suggest to do, they know what they are doing while writing that guide, so you should follow it.

When you are comfortable printing hello world to the screen you should start to build small projects to learn more about the libraries it support, or setup a webserver it will cover most of the things a programming language can do, 'I/O operations', 'Networking', 'Sockets', 'Multithreading' and much more.

Conclusion 👈

- Focus on learning the working of a programming language rather than the syntax 

- Data structures and algorithms can get you up to speed to a new language faster than you think

- And most importantly give it time.

- The more errors you make will help to, and you'll know how to break the language (maybe it will help you in future while contributing to some strangers code ;)

If you are really interested in learning new languages check out 'The Pragmatic Programmer" series, there is a great book you can read.