Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Anderson
The trouble comes when one insists on using that procedural-programming background instead of letting go and opening one's mind to the dataflow paradigm.
It's a very Zen-like situation. The less you know, the more you learn. To learn faster, you must first forget the knowledge you already have.
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This is completely true. I took a course in programming languages, at first glance the class seemed simple, we had to learn the basics of different languages and write relatively simple programs. By this point in my Computer Science Curriculum I had little difficulty picking up languages.
The real test came when new paradigms were introduced. (Functional and Logic programming). You have to forget what you know about programming and start again, obviously it is still easier to learn than it was to learn your first language, however it is much harder than learning an additional language that follows the same paradigm.
Comparing it to learning spoken languages, Java to C++ is like French to Spanish, structure is the same, syntax is simmilar. Going from C++ to Labview is like French to German, the structure and approach are completely different.
When moving to a new programming paradigm, it is important to remember to apply the lessons you have learned about how to learn a language, not to apply the lessons about the actual language.