February 2010
Beginner
255 pages
6h 10m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 49. Learn Foreign Languages
PROGRAMMERS NEED TO COMMUNICATE. A lot.
There are periods in a programmer’s life when most communication seems to be with the computer—more precisely, with the programs running on that computer. This communication is about expressing ideas in a machine-readable way. This remains an exhilarating prospect: programs are ideas turned into reality, with virtually no physical substance involved.
Programmers need to be fluent in the language of the machine, whether real or virtual, and in the abstractions that can be related to that language via development tools. It is important to learn many different abstractions, otherwise some ideas become incredibly hard to express. Good programmers need to be able to stand outside their daily routine, to be aware of other languages that are expressive for other purposes. The time always comes when this pays off.
Beyond communication with machines, programmers need to communicate with their peers. Today’s large projects are more social endeavors than simply the applied art of programming. It is important to understand and express more than the machine-readable abstractions can. Most of the best programmers I know are also very fluent in their mother tongue, and typically in other languages as well. This is not just about communication with others: speaking a language well also leads to a clarity of thought ...
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