<story><title>Learning a new language, or how I gained familiarity with Go</title><url>https://www.jvt.me/posts/2022/08/12/learning-new-language-go/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thejammahimself</author><text>I feel like a significant part of learning a new language is also learning the standard library alongside the new syntax. Especially because these can be quite different between different languages.</text></item><item><author>kubb</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s always important to ask yourself what concepts you knew before you learned a new technology X. For someone who knows C++ and Java there are no new concepts in Go, so the tour of Go should suffice.&lt;p&gt;For someone who doesn&amp;#x27;t know what a function, a pointer, and a string is, there&amp;#x27;s more work to be done.&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons Go is praised for simplicity is that it only requires us to know basic concepts. You already know how to call a function and store some integers in a struct. All you need is to get used to the new syntax.&lt;p&gt;For those who like to flex their brains and learn to think in new ways, this could be a disadvantage, but for someone overwhelmed with information it&amp;#x27;s a godsend.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you always limit yourself to Go then it will be harder to pick up other technologies that take advantage of concepts not featured there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Groxx</author><text>Yeah.  Particularly after having learned 2 or 3 languages, learning the N+1th &lt;i&gt;language&lt;/i&gt; is often the work of like an hour or three.&lt;p&gt;Learning the standard library, and the patterns it has encouraged in the community, takes &lt;i&gt;years&lt;/i&gt; and is a moving target.  Even a basic (accurate) &amp;quot;feel&amp;quot; for things generally takes weeks, regardless of how &amp;quot;simple&amp;quot; the language is.  You might be able to produce code prior to that, but being able to predict where something should be, or how to find it, takes time.</text></comment>
<story><title>Learning a new language, or how I gained familiarity with Go</title><url>https://www.jvt.me/posts/2022/08/12/learning-new-language-go/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thejammahimself</author><text>I feel like a significant part of learning a new language is also learning the standard library alongside the new syntax. Especially because these can be quite different between different languages.</text></item><item><author>kubb</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s always important to ask yourself what concepts you knew before you learned a new technology X. For someone who knows C++ and Java there are no new concepts in Go, so the tour of Go should suffice.&lt;p&gt;For someone who doesn&amp;#x27;t know what a function, a pointer, and a string is, there&amp;#x27;s more work to be done.&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons Go is praised for simplicity is that it only requires us to know basic concepts. You already know how to call a function and store some integers in a struct. All you need is to get used to the new syntax.&lt;p&gt;For those who like to flex their brains and learn to think in new ways, this could be a disadvantage, but for someone overwhelmed with information it&amp;#x27;s a godsend.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you always limit yourself to Go then it will be harder to pick up other technologies that take advantage of concepts not featured there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mxuribe</author><text>&amp;gt; I feel like a significant part of learning a new language is also learning the standard library alongside the new syntax...&lt;p&gt;OMG, you are so right!  I feel the same.  Knowing what the standard libraries bring (or don&amp;#x27;t bring) for each language that one learsn is immensely helpful. Sometimes this helps me decide which language to use for particular use-case&amp;#x2F;project, or sometimes it helps me better understand what the level of effort will be for a project if i use langugae X vs language Y, and on and on, etc. I feel like a tour of each language&amp;#x27;s standard libraries is a must when learning a new language; or at least a cusrosry review of the most important and&amp;#x2F;.or most often used functions, etc. of said standard libs.</text></comment>