Catching up, Fighting distractions, Polyglotting

Over the last month I got into the nasty habit of not blogging. One of the toughest aspects of writing on the topic of apprenticeship is how easy it is to get distracted.  When a software developer writes about reading and learning, it's tough not to find yourself doing more reading and learning than writing.  It's not fair that there is always some new conversation, meme, API, or technology to learn about!  This problem of mine is what I love about this field, but makes focused writing difficult.  The reason this book stalled in 2005 was due to Ajax and then Ruby on Rails.  I simply could not ignore the opportunity they presented.  I was writing about the importance of one's ability to learn new technologies and there were two revolutionary technologies staring me in the face.  And now I find myself fighting off an endless barrage of distractions (aka opportunities) that slow down my book writing and blogging.  Thankfully (for the writing) I haven't recognized anything revolutionary enough to stall me for more than a few weeks.

One of my latest distractions is the polyglot meme. One of the apprenticeship patterns is Your First Language, which is a fundamental (if not obvious) pattern that covers the ins, outs, do's and don'ts of that first deep dive.  Neal Ford is one of the instigators of the polyglot meme and recently had some words of wisdom for learning a new language:

Anytime you learn a new language, you have 2 battles: first, learn the syntax (which is the easiest part -- it's just details of how familiar concepts are expressed in the new syntax). The second battle is the more important one: how to become an idiomatic programmer in that language.

My first language was Perl and I fell in love with it.  I thought it was the only language I would ever use.  And then I learned Java and Ruby.  One made me feel smart and one made me feel good.  These days I'm focusing more and more on JavaScript and with the help and guidance of Fred Polgardy, I am fighting the second battle that Neal was referring to. It's fun to know several languages, it's very freeing.  I still have many more languages to explore (Lisp, Scala, Haskell, Erlang, Python) and that's one of the self-serving reasons that I started The Polyglot Programmers User Groups recently.  I was actually leading a Perl Mongers group near my home but I was having trouble finding Perl speakers, so my colleagues and I morphed it into Polyglot Programmers SIG of Uniforum Chicago.  And this week is the first meeting of our downtown group, the Polyglot Programmers of Chicago.

I would enjoy hearing about your experiences learning your first and subsequent languages.