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Ask HN: Platform for senior devs to learn other programming languages?
29 points by Raed667 3 hours ago | hide | past | web | 15 comments | favorite





There is also

https://learnxinyminutes.com/

It gives small language syntax/feature tours.

Each file is legitimate syntax for the language it documents.


This is excellent. I checked Julia which is my main language and all essentials are there. Looked up to Zig, F#, Go all accessible expositions and makes it easy to get a good taste before looking into the manuals.

As a self-guided alternative, you could try going through https://adventofcode.com/ problems with your language of choice.

I think you are looking for Exercism: https://exercism.org/

Great website!

Edit: This also looks good, haven't tried it yet: https://app.codecrafters.io/catalog


amazing ! Yes thank you

I was thinking about this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41463734


What’s the difference between how a senior and non-senior learn that would warrant a unique platform for each?

I’m going to go against the flow and say nothing. I think the primary reason you see seniors looking for senior focused platforms is because almost all the learning content is terrible. Seniors will spot this sooner than juniors. I’ve worked as an external examiner for CS students for a decade and the stuff they put themselves through to avoid reading official docs is amazing. They’ll literally sit through 50 hours of video of what is essentially two a4 pages of “example how-to”.

Why a senior wouldn’t just head directly to the documentation for a programming language or the equivalent to “The C++ Programming Language” is a different question though. Learning a new language is extremely easy, it’s learning how the compiler, runtime and so on which is hard. You’ll very rarely find that outside of official docs or books written by extremely knowledgeable people.


All your reasoning is agreeable but I disagree with the foremost conclusion

> I’m going to go against the flow and say nothing.

Whether we're talking about the actual language or the surrounding tooling and ecosystem, very few language and ecosystem experiences are actually different. As a result you're often mapping needs that you already satisfied and can explicitly state to another language. Someone who has already learned their nth language looks at learning very differently.

This also makes a seasoned learner vastly more capable of extracting value from a friend or colleague who is willing to steer the learning experience.


Senior doesn't need to learn about loops, ifs and so on

For example when learning C++ while being proficient at C# I found useful this blog: https://www.jacksondunstan.com/articles/5530

"C++ For C# Developers: Part 1 – Introduction"

Author compares features between C# and C++ and shows what is similar, the same, different, non-existent, etc.


Well a senior developer would be assumed to share a certain common understanding of concepts and terms that a more junior developer might not. When teaching anything one of the most important parts is ta gauge your pupils and determine whether they need more or less information to keep the topic interesting while not making it impossible to follow along. Since written or otherwise pre-recorded teaching materials aren't afforded the luxury of interacting with their pupils they must choose ahead of time what level they are aimed at. And since a senior in any field would be able to follow along with materials meant for the junior, albeit at a slower and less interesting pace, but not the other way around they tend to err on the side of over-explanation. A platform for teaching senior developers would therefore allow a more engaging and time saving experience for those able to consume it.

Another programming language as reference. I can learn a new language really easily this way, but the first was really hard - it was so unlike anything i had ever done before.

The essence of being senior, I feel is "I have made the mistake you are about to make". This echoes in language learning. When I was learning Go I could easily pinpoint what language design decisions were made because of lessons learned from this language or that. (I do not want to suggest schismogenesis applies to programming languages but ... it kinda sorta does?) Teaching with this in mind needs a very different curriculum.

Also, basic exercises are boring because we did them ten thousand and one times already just with slightly different syntax.


Not sure which post you reference but https://codecrafters.io is pretty cool for learning a new language

+1 for codecrafters

Use LLMs. Claude could generate a full course plan and execute it



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