You Can't Learn Any Language in 15 Minutes


Last week I wrote the post Learn Python in 15 Minutes.  The point of that post was to demonstrate that the basic fundamentals of the Python language are simple and easy to learn.  However I will be the first to admit that you cannot learn any language in 15 minutes.  You won't be anywhere near proficient at least.

Working in a particular language consists of much more than the language's syntax.  Part of being fluent in a programming language consists of being familiar with certain things such as string manipulation, collections handling, familiarity with the supporting framework and libraries and available third party frameworks.

Anytime you learn a new language and you are already proficient with a different language, the question that always comes up is "I can do X thing in language Y, how do I do that in language Z?".  This is similar to knowing a real language but unfamiliar with the nuances of a different culture.  Don't believe me? Put someone from littletown USA and drop them off in New York City to fend for themselves.  It will be a journey full of learning experiences.

Just this week I got lost in Python land.  I ran into a few issues with, what should be simple, string manipulation.

I was trying to  check a string for certain subvalue.  The program that I was working on fetched the HTML from http://www.theverge.com and extracted all anchor tags and checked the links to see if they contained the substring "theverge.com". If they did, I added them to my list of strings so that I could later do something with them.  The problem was that I didn't know how to check for a substring in Python.

In C# you can simply use the .IndexOf() or .Contains method of a string.  Python is different. I researched the issue and within a minute or two I had my answer. You simply run the line

if "foo" in bar:

That's the way you check a string for a substring in Python.  However, 20-30 minutes later and my code still didn't seem to work correctly.  I later found out that the value I was working was a dictionary and not a string.  I had assumed that I was getting a string from the API I was using.

I tried several things to check for a substring. I tried the .find method of string but that didn't work either. It wasn't until it dawned on me that I may not be working with a string after all.  Once I figured out that I was working with a dictionary it was easy enough to correct my error.

I questioned the functionality of way strings work in Python. Was I working with a version that didn't accept that syntax?  Was my string null and misbehaving?  Point is that if I was fluent in Python I would've recognized the issue and resolved it much faster than the 20-30 minutes that it took me.

So... no, you really can't learn and be proficient in any language in 15 minutes.  The only way you can do that is study, practice, practice, rinse and repeat.  There is no other way around it.

What do you think you need to be considered proficient in your programming language?  Please comment below and be sure to sign up for more posts like this one by entering your email below.  You can also follow me on Twitter @fernandozamoraj.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Simple Example of Using Pipes with C#

Image
So I decided to dig into understanding how Asp.net works under the hood, out of curiosity.  In the articles that I found the authors described the architecture in lower level details.  One of the things that caught my eyes was the use of named Pipes as a means of inter-process communications by the architecture.   So I decided to dig into that portion a little bit deeper.  I discovered that the .Net framework has a namespace for named pipes and it's quite easy to use. I intend to demonstrate a small example that I cooked up rather quickly by setting up a named pipe server and then connecting a pipe client to it.  Before I do that, I want to say as a disclaimer that I don't know that this example demonstrates the best way to use pipes.  What it does do is show the most straightforward way to use them.  Also, before you use pipes you should consider using something else like WCF instead if you need well defined interfaces, as using pipes is pretty raw.   Being the type of perso
Read more

Putting Files on the Rackspace File Cloud

Recently, I’ve been playing around with Asp.Net MVC and I (along with some friends) am creating an Asp.Net MVC application that can access files from our website. This means that files must display on the site as well as provide a way to download/upload them. I won’t give away all the details of the project but I will say this: Sharing photos is one of the driving forces for our project.  The files are only image type files( jpg, etc) The files must be uploaded by the users and stored somewhere within our system.  We don’t necessarily know at this time how much storage space we need but we think that we will need a little at first but possibly a lot more down the road. This means that the storage of these files must be scalable. The uploading of files must be controlled by our system.  Right off the bat we started our application and were uploading files to the web server with no problem.  We only did it this way to kind of prove our system model. We were just basically writing
Read more

Why I Hate Regular Expressions

I have a love-hate relationship with regular expressions.  I admire their power yet I hate the pain and agony they have caused on more than one occasion. Just recently one of my colleagues used a regular expression for validating passwords. It seems pretty fair to use regular expressions for validating character sequence patterns. After all it seems they were created exactly for that.  However when regular expressions fail they fail hard.  What I mean by that is that they usually fail in the production environment. In case you are wondering what a regular expression is take a look at the wikipedia explanation of regular expressions . So we go live and all of a sudden new users can't be created because the regular expression says that the password is not valid due to one of the complexity rules.  But how?  The regular expression passed all the unit tests.  In fact the application works fine in our development and test deployment.  So what happened? The validation works fine unti
Read more