Fri, 09 Jan 2009

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Teach yourself programming in ten years

Here's Peter Norvig's good old essay about the time and effort it takes to learn a craft. One of his points is to learn a lot of languages; here's a list of the ones I've dabbled in since 1977:

  • BASIC
  • FORTRAN
  • C
  • TeX/LaTeX
  • TCL
  • PostScript
  • emacs lisp
  • perl
  • Mathematica

and I'm probably leaving some out. I'm not an expert in any of them, though I did write some very cool stuff in TeX and PostScript lo! these many years ago. I've found it takes some effort to switch from my current language to one of the older ones - like traveling to France with only your high-school French to get by on for a few days.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.—Lord Peter Wimsey

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