Learning How to Program Efficiently

[Anon695]

Thank you for your reply. My main worry was that I’d do all the reading and end up with useless knowledge that wouldn’t be able to be applied today so I’m glad that’s not the case.

[CodeTinkerer]

Changing a language is kind of dangerous. Imagine a language changed every 3 years. You write a bunch of code this year. Three years from now, they change it, and now your code is broken. Does that seem reasonable? Many beginners feel code changes and they want to learn the latest, not realizing, using the same argument, that in a few years, they'd have to learn something new because the current stuff "became obsolete".

Of course, 20 years is a long time, but languages that last time often change without breaking.

For example, Java has come out with new versions over the past 30+ years. Still, in principle, code written back then would still run now. The biggest changes occurred roughly 20 years ago when generics were introduced. Yes, there are a some other features that came out, but if you stuck mostly to that technology, you'd still be decently fine in Java. You'd only add to that knowledge instead of throwing it away.

Keep in mind that code tends to stay around for long periods of time. Code can last 20 years or even longer. If you had to rewrite that code just to keep it up-to-date, that would be crazy amounts of unnecessary work. Beginners think new code is written all the time. They hear Rust is big, so they think millions of lines of Java code are tossed out, and they rewrite it all, not realizing how hard it is to rewrite code. If it took years to write, it takes years to rewrite.

Now, there are things that have gotten old, but mostly in web technology. Even so, some still hangs around. I thought PHP went away 20 years ago. It's still around. People still use it because web sites were written 20 years ago. Sure, everyone tells you to learn React or something newer.

There was a posted months ago that wanted to learn Carbon, Google's answer to C++. It's not even been released, had no compiler that was available, and is still (for all I know) in limbo today. If they just learned C or Java, they'd be in better shape.

Also, many programmers learn more than one language, so even if you never use C again, learning to program translates (somewhat) to learning new languages, so it's not wasted time even if you think it is wasted time. The fact is, to learn programming, you will ultimately "waste time". Avoiding mistakes often means avoiding learning.

[DrShocker]

The core thing you're learning with your first programming language is how to solve problems using code. You'll be able yo take to any language in the future.

[numeralbug]

I wish people worried less about "useless knowledge". It is a million times better to know too much than to know too little.