Learning New Programming Languages
These are some of the things that help me when I'm learning a new programming language. I hope they're helpful for you too:
Mostly Wikipedia. The questions I'm usually asking are: what's the type system like? Do I need to compile stuff? What's the paradigm? What are the key language features?
I want to get a rough understanding of what I'm getting into and what's it good for.
I've tried reading blogs, watching screencasts and trying to "wing it", but the best way I've found to get started is to get a book and read the first 5-6 chapters. I don't spend too much time reading each page unless I'm dealing with new concepts. Instead, what I'm doing is finding the basic tool set that allows me to write minimal programs. I look for stuff that I already understand (how do conditionals work? How do I create a string? Do we have a regex library?) and then I try to re-create something easy like a permalink function. The idea is to get me doing "productive" work as soon as possible.
If there are interesting, language-specific features (e.g. Lisp macros, goroutines, monads) then I want to learn about them rather quickly. I might not understand what I'm doing at the first but acquiring new knowledge motivates me to dive deeper. All interesting languages have "their" thing, so try to find those and exploit them as soon as you can.
Create a file per useful construct
My memory sucks and searching through books (physical or digital) sucks even more. For every new language I'll create a folder where I have one file for each useful construct. Here's an example of an array.go file I used when learning Go. I use source code files because they're "greppable", executable and by separating them it's easier to use them as reference. I add comments for concepts that I find important.
There's a huge gap between "I can write a permalink function" and "I can write production code in this language". You can either fill that gap by writing lots of code, or you can go and see how someone else has solved problems you're already familiar with. Instead of writing hundreds of crappy LoC, I can take a look at something like web.go and learn the idioms that experienced programmers use. I already have a decent understanding of web frameworks, but if I'm not getting something I'll usually play inside a REPL, go back to the book or jump into an IRC channel to get some guidance. Most communities are helpful to new users so don't be afraid to ask simple questions (but do your own research first!).
Everyone will tell you that this is the most important thing when learning a new language. Listen to them.
When I start to feel proficient I'll create something that's useful for me, something I want to be using right now. When I was learning Emacs Lisp I decided to write a Tumblr mode so I could post updates from my text editor. The code wasn't pretty (or idiomatic), but at the time I was using it almost daily so I had a motivation to keep learning more about the language in order to make my software better.
(Don't know what to build? Give me a hand, I have a list of smallish projects and not enough time to implement them. One of might them be interesting to you).
Don't criticize as a noob. Languages (at least the good ones) are not optimized for newbies. Don't go complaining about how hard it is to accomplish X in Y language when you've only been using it for two weeks. To stay with the Go examples: the guys behind it are pretty fucking smart people, if they decided string interpolation should be done by calling some variation of Sprintf they most likely had a reason for this (which I still don't understand, but I'm a noob).
Approach the language humbly and you'll have an easier time, trust me.
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