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There was an article a few years ago on how the time investment of learning new programming tools is often worthwhile. I believe awk was included as an example.

Anyone recall it?




It's usually easier to learn one new thing at a time. If you're a C# programmer interested in Clojure, you need to consider transitioning from Windows to Linux, Imperative OO to FP, .NET to Java, and Visual Studio to Emacs/Vim/Eclipse/Netbeans all at once.

I'm reading books on both F# and Clojure in an effort to get comfortable with functional programming. Plenty of it is sticking but the Clojure toolchain occupies a lot more of my mental bandwidth than the F# toolchain since I can work comfortably in Visual Studio.

I am learning on all of these fronts simultaneously but it still detracts from my ability to isolate Clojure and learn it without additional effort: I run Windows on a daily basis but I play in Ubuntu VMs regularly to facilitate my programming exploration. I am happiest in Notepad++ but I've recently learned Vim to help me code in Linux. I am honestly not particularly familiar with the ins and outs of .NET but Java is a completely new world to me, particularly the build system.


You might find similar articles searching for "sharpen your saw" - that's the phrase the Pragmatic Programmer uses.

Awk has a pretty high utility : time-to-learn ratio. It helps that the language is so small.




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