A Month of “Hello, World” | Hacker News Reader

A Month of “Hello, World”

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45 pointsingve20 comments

I think this article would be more useful/interesting if it was extended to include language-specific things you found interesting, and specific pieces of expertise you gained in your usual working languages by exploring new ones rather than the rather generalised picture of the entire journey you've included.

Agreed. More information would be great, and there is some --> after some clicking you'll get to see some code and discussion.

Here are the "languages" and the code:

List of things to try: https://github.com/hagata/30daysofHelloWorld/issues/1

Code: https://github.com/hagata/30daysofHelloWorld

I actually did look through the github, in hope of not posting a stupid comment.

It's useful, but still not really substantial in terms of what generally-applicable knowledge gains he made from specific languages.

Agreed.

> I now have experience with 30 additional technologies

He probably hasn't gained anything.

"Hello world" is useless and you're not learning anything with it, not even how to install the compiler or interpreter, because in a year from now the current distribution model might be obsolete already. And regular people can install apps too.

In my experience it takes about a year, at a minimum, to learn a language and absorb the concepts and best practices in its ecosystem. And if a language is so similar to something you already know that it takes less than a year and you don't need it urgently for anything in particular, then that's time wasted.

If in that set there are 10 interesting languages worth learning, then it will take the author at least 10 years.

Did you read the article? You certainly didn't look at the GitHub code he linked to. The R section, for example, creates a simple plot about deaths on the Titanic categorised by gender and cabin class.

I assure you he gained more than you did typing your condescending comment, and more than anyone did reading it.

The original author just called it, but phrased it in a more "hardliner" fashion. It would have been great if the blog post gave some deeper/original insight to read about, but it really does not. Calling the comment condescending a judgement too hard.

I give the comment you responded to that it is really, really hard to read beyond the "30 languages in 30 days" claim" because I have not ever met a developer who could learn a language in depth in a day and therefore my bs-detector triggered immediately and forced a tab-close.

But thank you for pointing out that the OP indeed did not write 30 version of "hello world" in 30 languages - though it was a bit hard to read through your condescending comment that complains about a condescending comment.

While I agree that one probably doesn't gain much from "Hello Word" in many languages, I don't think learning new languages is always linear. Many languages overlap a lot, so switching from Java to C# or vice versa takes much less time than switching from C to Smalltalk. Given that learning a fundamentally different language takes one year, I'd argue that 10 would only take 3-4 years, as there are probably not 10 such "corners" in the programming language space.

I disagree.

You might not be able to learn anything specifically practical in a day or two on a language, but I offer that it can provide a lot of insight.

Learning a bit of Scala helped me re-think how I write some other code.

Learning optionals in Swift made me think a lot about that as it applies to Java.

Yet I have no real competence in either Scala or Swift.

And this: spending one single day in TypeScript made me realize I want to learn the rest of it, and within a few days I decided that I would never write Javascript again :)

It's 'worth it' overall, to dabble on other platforms, I think.

> "Hello world" is useless and you're not learning anything with it

I agree "Hello world" would be useless, but note the author didn't mean it literally. Here is his github repo: https://github.com/hagata/30daysofHelloWorld

I tend to see programming languages/libraries/frameworks/whatever as a toolbox. It's better to have 3 tools and handle them well than to have 30 different tools and have little to no idea on how to use them.

A similar approach used to be pretty common in an intro to programming course for a CS major at universities at least 15-20 years ago.

Most homework assignments would be writing a very simple program in 5-6 substantially different languages (e.g., C, Scheme, C++, ML, Pascal). Knowing a number of different languages (and knowing that if needed I can pick a new one pretty easily) was very helpful, at least for me later on.

That said, 30 languages IMO is an overkill, as some are likely to be very similar -- one risks spending too much time on learning the syntax (e.g., commas vs semicolons) instead of getting exposed to fundamental language differences (e.g., closures and objects). My 2c.

I also ran couple of such series:

2013: 30 technologies in 30 days https://shekhargulati.com/30-technologies-in-30-days/

2016: 52 technologies in 2016 https://github.com/shekhargulati/52-technologies-in-2016

> My “aha moment” came around day 16, when I came to the perhaps obvious realization that every Javascript framework is just someone’s organized, opinionated way of writing code.

About time! Everyone goes on and on and on about Javascript fatigue ... everyone fails to notice that every one of those framework do nothing new except changing how the same concepts are written.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

-Bruce Lee

Probably the Github repository is a better source of this experiment, because it actually contains some learnings from the author: https://github.com/hagata/30daysofHelloWorld

I too like learning other programming languages but I use programming praxis problems for that. I have some projects in my bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/amatheus_personal/

Check this out: http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/abc.html

99 bottles of beer in all the languages.

RosettaCode has these for a lot of problems: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/99_Bottles_of_Beer

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