Ah, the joy’s of learning a new language
Sometimes there is nothing more frustrating that learning a new language. No, I’m not talking about a spoken language like Spanish or French (although those weren’t easy when I was in high school either). I’m talking about having to learn a new programming language.
This week I’ve had to work my way into the C language for work in a class I’m taking. Although I’ve dabbled in it before I never really had a reason to really do much in it. After all, I don’t really do much development for applications that aren’t on the web.
The first project I had to complete was to write my own version of fgrep. Fortunately it only had to be a simple version and didn’t have to make use of any of the options in the original. I got through it, but it wasn’t pretty. I found myself reverting to various functions and syntax that I use every day in Java and PHP, but of course don’t work in C. There-in lies the real challenge in learning a new computer language. Syntax is easy, and once you know the available libraries you can accomplish a lot. However when that syntax varies only minimally from what you’ve come to know, and when the libraries you’ve used for years are no longer available to you it can get very frustrating.
I guess I can’t complain. It never hurts to add another skill to a resume. I can say however that debugging in something you’ve never really worked with before can be more than a little taxing on your stress level however.
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