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Written by: Oliver Gierke
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By mswatcher
via sitepoint.com
Published: Feb 06 2013 / 18:19

Are you yet to learn your first programming language? Why is it that you’re putting it off? If you think it’s going to be too hard, like learning a real, spoken language – you are wrong. In fact, you’ve fallen victim to what I like to call The Big Programming Language Fallacy - the mistaken belief that programming languages are analogous to real languages. If you’re a victim of the Fallacy, you probably think that programming languages… are the ‘languages of computers’ are foreign and hard to read, and take years to learn.
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Martyr2 replied ago:

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I have a number of issues with these three points made in this article. First of all CSS is a bad example.. it is not a language. Second, when people say things like "fluent in Python" what they are often talking about is knowing it well enough to write code not focusing on the syntax but on what they are expressing. This leads to myth three about it taking as little as 12 weeks.... yeah maybe to write something and get it working, but that is often far from being someone who can say they are proficient. Like anything it takes an average of a few thousand hours to get verse enough to consider yourself an expert in it. Lastly, SQL may be a bit more straight forward, but many languages like C++ can be very cryptic to the first timer. They were not written for the general masses, they were written to be utilized by computer scientists and programmers... even though they are getting better with that over time. I do commend you for trying to peak interest and getting people motivated to program but those new to programming need to know the truth that learning a programming language is going to take a bit of work and head scratching. Take it from someone who has been in the industry over 15 years. :)

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gusc replied ago:

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I partially agree with the previous comment, but there is one more thing - most of the languages are designed as a syntactic sugar over well known languages. Take PHP for example - it's syntax is derived from C (and the object concepts come from Java). Now that being said, once you learn 2-3 different languages it really takes just a week or so to get a grip in a new one (with some exceptions, like the ones with completely different purpose - SQL, CSS, HTML, Assembly). I, my self, started as a PHP developer (including HTML, SQL, CSS, Javascript), then I learned some Java, then C# (as it's 90% similar to Java, just had to learn the .NET framework), then came C, C++, Python, ActionScript 3 and now it took me 1 month to get a grip on x86 Assembly. Next up ARM Assembly. The point is - if the next language is similar to the ones you know, it's really easy to learn. It's hard for me to say - how hard it would be to learn a programming language if you'd never learned any, that's a completely different story.

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