Sink or Swim? Let’s not.
In the continuing saga that is my professional life and programming, I seem to be doing more in Perl than anything else at the moment. Even with the motivation to read and study Java and Python I seem to be falling back on what I know better. And that’s not a bad thing, mind you. I just think I’m falling victim to the old jump in the deep end before you can swim routine with these other languages.
For the most part, though, I think that it’s good to jump into a project and just flail away at the new APIs, functions and such. But there are other times when trying to learn a language on the side is tedious. Life gets in the way sometimes and the time between picking up the books lengthens. The fundamentals that you read about in the beginning didn’t stick like they should and you find yourself going back and reading it again. That sounds pretty negative but if you think about it we learn a lot when that happens. I had a Murphy’s Law page a day calendar several years ago and one of the days said, “Snider’s Law: Nothing can be done in one trip.” All the things I know really well took a lot of repetition to learn. Sometimes it just takes time and a little patience goes a long way.
There a few big projects that I would like to attack but the foundation just isn’t there and I think it would only disappoint more that educate. For example, I would like to create a Java app that would serve as the central control panel for the the tedious things we have to keep up t0 date at work such as updating the Message of the Day, managing the sudoers file, ssh keys, etc. Not necessarily like the Solaris Management Console but similar, I suppose. Who knows if that project will come to fruition. But, the idea is there and there’s a need so who knows. I like to create and solve problems.
So, where am I now? A little further along in … some direction. And some direction is better than standing/sitting still.
