Don’t Just Learn the Language, Understand its Culture

In their seminal book, The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas encourage us to learn a new programming language every year. I’ve tried to live by their advice and throughout the years I’ve had the experience of programming in many languages. My most important lesson from my polyglot adventures is that it takes more than just learning the syntax to learn a language: You need to understand its culture. You can write Fortran in any language, but to truly learn a language you have to embrace the language. Don’t make excuses if your C# code is a long Main method with mostly static helper methods, but learn why classes make sense. Don’t shy away if you have a hard time understanding the lambda expressions used in functional languages, force yourself to use them.

You’ll also get a better understanding of design patterns by moving between different languages. C programmers find that C# and Java have commoditized the iterator pattern. In Ruby and other dynamic languages you might still use a visitor, but your implementation won’t look like the example from the Gang of Four book.

By Anders Norås