Thoughts on Languages from Someone who Does not Know

After learning Ruby during module 1 I received a bit of criticism from both instructors and friends in higher modules for not pushing myself a little more. They generally suggested that I should look outside the curriculum and find another language to learn. Here are my thoughts on this ranging from why I’m generally hesitant to behave this way and what ended up doing.

For starters: why I needed this push.

I find it pretty difficult to motivate myself to do/learn something if there is not an immediate goal/purpose in doing so. The thought of learning new things is always interesting to me, but it’s hard to stick with it without some goal in mind. And since I have a general lack of creativity when it comes to creating projects I have trouble find a goal to motivate myself to learn something else.

I decided that I was definitely going to try and learn another language anyways.

I poked around at several. Did an introductory to Go, went to a Clojure group, looked at a fellow classmate’s Elm project (very jealous that he found a project that he was interested in that he could use to make himself learn), and eventually stumbled upon a language called Nim.

I’ve decided to take up Nim.

It’s a relatively young language based on the syntax of Python. It is a compiled system level language that is very flexible. However, it is still a little complex and I’ve had trouble picking up some of the language while going through the tutorials. So I have now decided to take a step back and do something that should be a little easier and yet probably more useful.

Learn Python.

I’ve got 2 Raspberry Pi’s that I’ve played around on, but not done a whole lot with. I’ve got a couple projects that I’d like to try out on them so it makes sense to learn Python in order to take advantage of them. It should also be an easier step to take from Ruby to Python than Ruby to Nim.

Baby Steps…