telophase | (no subject)

I'm wondering how much of the same neural circuitry is involved in learning spoken languages and computer languages. I can see lots of parallels here, but as I've never managed to successfully learn to speak another language[1], I'm not entirely sure.

I can speak PHP already to an extent - I'm basically fluent in it, but I have the equivalent of a really thick accent and a decent vocabulary that requires looking a lot of things up to figure if there's a short term that does what I want this really long paragraph to do. I'm learning ASP now, and it's far easier than it would have been two years ago because I now know the basic logic behind the coding, but as I code now I'm thinking in PHP and having to translate to ASP, which involves a lot of looking things up in books. Admittedly a lot of my PHP coding involves looking things up in books, but I'm looking up more complicated things and I'm looking up bits and pieces of things that I'm knitting together in my brain to form complex functions, while in ASP I'm looking up incredibly basic grammar and vocabulary. To worry that metaphor a bit more, PHP and ASP would be Romance languages - somewhat similar to my own and similar enough to each other that they share much of the same logic and knowing one helps you understand a bit of the other. In which case, would would be the comptur-language equivalent of Japanese? Or does the metaphor completely break down?

In an ideal world I expect that learning computer languages would help my brain retain spoken languages, but I doubt that's the case, more's the pity.

[1] I chalk this up to the fact that the way you learn to speak another language is to actually speak to other people in it, and I have problems with thinking of things to say when speaking to people in my own language, it's doubly hard to sit there and think of what to say, translate it into French or Italian or whatever, and then say it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

lisp or forth are probably the japanese of languages. their syntax is completely different from most languages, and the structures used to solve problems is also completely different.

*makes note not to learn them*

Well, I'm being silly with that, but in the short term I don't currently have any use for them. :) Perl, I can see learning at some point in the next couple of years (from what I understand some of the scripts up here at work are in Perl), but I'm sticking to primarily web coding stuff in the near future.

Learning to program better, and learning new programming languages, are almost synonomous. Each new language you expose yourself to gives you new understanding of the nature of programming, because (in particular, the japanese languages :) typically provide much more elegant structures to work with, and you can then creatively apply the same ideas to improve your programming in the other languages as well.

Have a hard time with recursion? Lisp will force you to understand it deeper than you think possible. Want to understand stacks better? Learn a little forth - it's all stack all the time. Like to understand the true nature of OO programming? Learn smalltalk. Want to learn naming and literate programming? Learn Perl - literate programming and contextual framing are deeply rooted in the nature and progenesis of the language.

As a way of firming up your understanding or programming, learning new languages and apis, and writing lots of code, are the two best ways to advance.

That and read "Code Complete", if you haven't already, which is probably the most important step a programmer will ever take.

*makes note of book*

Cool. OO programming is something that I have a hard time conceptualizing. When someone hears that, they all say "Well, you see, it treats these things as objects and each object has these things that describe what it is and what it does" and the problem for me isn't that - it's that I can't conceptualize how it /works/. I think visually and kinesthetically, and I have to sort of be able to construct a framework and workflow in my head to be able to understand something, and I can't do that with OO languages yet. I'm thinking that ASP will help this, but I haven't got there yet.

I think the thing that really keeps me from going out and learning other programming languages is that I need a project to work on to do it - I can't just noodle through lessons and tutorials without some sort of concrete objective in mind. If such a project comes along - like ASP just came along and I'm suspecting Perl will come along before too long - then I'll end up learning it. (I'm going to say here that I love that I can now sit at my desk at work and bash my head against ASP and get paid to do it, instead of having to do it on my own time.)

And then there's that whole "only 24 hours in the day" thing, too. :)

The metaphor really doesn't break down. It's a good one. I assume you've read SNow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. If not, I'm quite surprised, and I recommend you go read it, since it has, at its core, this same idea. That basically programming languages are learned and coded into the brain the same way as traditional languages. Or vice versa. :)

Yup, I've read it. Too long ago, but I can't reread at the moment, since almost all my waking time is currently taken up by TEH_SEKRIT_PROJECT and what isn't taken up by that has been taken up by watching CSI reruns on TV.

What do you recommend for me? I would like to learn PHP and ASP, but every single online tutorial I find, makes absolutely *no* sense. I work well out of books though.

I've got a ton of books on PHP because I discovered that the way I solve computer problems is to go out and buy another book. :) And also, the ones I use have changed over time as I got better at it. Here's ones that I remember - I'll have to go look at my bookshelf after work to see if there's others I didn't remember.

I took a class in PHP at UNT last year (which didn't teach me much I didn't already know by then), and the prof used the Visual Quickstart series for PHP (http://www.peachpit.com/title/0201727870) and MySQL (http://www.peachpit.com/title/0321127315) (Looks like they've got one that combines PHP and MySQL (http://www.peachpit.com/title/0321186486), but I ahvne't looked at it). If you want to do database-driven websites, you'll have to learn MySQL or another database at the same time you're doing PHP, but it's perfectly possible to do dynamic websites using textfiles instead of databases if you want to. The O'Reilly books are, of course, some of the best guides out there, but I find that for me they're not good when I'm first beginning something, but become good after I've got over that first learning curve (in that series, Programming PHP (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progphp/) and the PHP Cookbook (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/phpckbk/) are the two I use most often). THe one exception to that is the pocket-sized PHP reference book (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/phppr2/) they put out, which is mostly just a list of all the functions available in PHP and a quick explanation of them. Not too good by itself if you're a beginner, but I found it useful because if, say, I needed to do something with a string, I could look through the section on string functions and pick a likely few to look up in other books, so it functioned as a sort of index to PHP. I've also used the book on Web database applications (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webdbapps/index.html) from them.

Another book I sued that helped me a lot was the PHP Black Book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1588800539/103-1413284-9358232?v=glance), but I found it on sale - it's quite expensive otherwise. And a former prof of mine pretty much swears by the Wrox Press (http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/productCd-0764557440.html) line of books.

The one thing non-book-wise that helped me learn PHP was the realization that I ahve to have a project to learn something - I can't just start messing about with tutorials. Once I decided to code a restaurant review database, it only took me a month (ok, a month with a lot of 14-hour days), and at the end of the month I had a hacked-together working website and a fairly decent understanding of PHP. If I started without a project, I'd still be at square one. Right now, I've been assigned the task of redoing the intranet calendar program here at work, so that's helping me learn ASP.

I have so many books because I find that each book will have its own large blind spot and just totally not cover something, or because the authors will assume something is obvious and not explain it fully or just mention it in passing, or they'll not explain it very well. And exactly what it is that's missing, not defined, or badly explained is completely different for each book, so I usually ahve about four of them sitting on my desk as I'm coding.

Not to mention that I've found the best way for me to solve a knotty coding problem is to go out and buy another book. It invariably works. :)

And as for ASP, the book Active Server Pages in Plain English (http://programmingnetwork.tripod.com/bk_asp/isbn_0764547453.htm) has been the best, combined with the Wrox Press book Beginning Active Server Pages (http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/productCd-0764543636.html). I'm deliberately trying not to buy any more ASP books, but scour the Net instead when I have problems. It's mostly worked - I've checked out every ASP book here at the library and they're all on my desk instead. :)