Spending painful years in classes where we've been taught the grammar extensively I couldn't agree more with those people. Two languages, the same way of teaching and time wasted all the same. So I say, just skimming the grammar book should be enough to get you going. You can always come back to it when you read something and don't get the rules.
Indeed. I sucked at English (as a foreign language) in school. Real progress came from video games / books / later TV shows.
It's perhaps a slower way (unless you go to live for half a year+ in the country and don't use too much the crutch of help available in your languages), but not a harder one (ditto).
Maybe for the very beginning, when you first learn phonetics and alphabet/ideograms, where the "floor" is infamously higher in Japanese for non-~Asians ?
Incomprehensible to me. Learning the grammar of a language is the most fun part, in my opinion! Vocab is hard work, but learning ways to form a sentence? Magical.
It can work for some people? You aren’t so much not learning grammar as you are inferring the grammar via practice instead of up front studying the rules. Like the difference between training a neural network to compile code vs writing a parser.
Eh, worked fine for me in Latin. Well, until "Hannibal, with his friends, the Romans, traversed the alps". At least my teacher had her laugh for the year.
Not overreacting. It can happen to anyone of us and we just ignore it, keep going, and think "it will probably never be me, only happens to others". Until it it us.
"HTML/CSS in a programming language list? seriously?"
I just googled "programming languages you should learn" - 3rd result:
http://www.sitepoint.com/whats-best-programming-language-lea... ("What’s the Best Programming Language to Learn in 2015?")
4th "Programming Language" is...: CSS!
You know that's nonsense, but a newbie doesn't
That's the problem. By including it you mean this article is (also) for newbies. And is an opinionated, biased article. The author is fostering more "lemming programmers".
"Is that supposed to convince me to use this in the industry, and apply my time?"
I say in the article:
«- Does this mean that I should use Scala?
Can you get a job you like programming Scala? If so, then: yes!
(Otherwise, unless you're rich, you need to pay your bills...)»
If don't think you can get a job programming Scala (because of where you live, or another reason) I explicitly say you shouldn't learn it! :)
But the rate at which Scala jobs are becoming available is relevant: I don't care if there are 200 Java jobs near me, as long as there are 3 or 4 Scala ones. As long as I have a Scala job, I don't care if the other companies are programming something else. If you can't get a Scala job - again: it's probably best to not even to take the time to learn it.
If we were to discuss everything in this article, starting with dynamic vs static typing, we'd still be here 3 months from now :). Which is why it is opinionated.
The problem with that section isn't so much that it is opinionated, it's that you can't really have a sensible discussion about typing on just a dynamic vs. static axis.
At the very least you should address the implications of strong vs. weak typing, and you should probably address the strength and nature of the type systems, also. After all, saying that both C and Haskell are statically largely misses the point.
Yeah, I was just going to edit my comment to say "well, at least the author states it is 100% Opinionated View" :) But you could skip that part and have more arguments, although without it you couldn't easily rule out some languages (e.g. LISP). I have to admit I'm also biased as a Clojure fan, and I find Scala too verbose and less functional than Clojure. Oh and btw, I read it all :P
Learned Polish recently. It's the same. But people do try the supposedly easy way of learning it "without studying the grammar".