this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Tbf, "learned a language" is a hard thing to pin down in any case.
I've been building enterprise software with python for almost a decade now. I still occasionally find stuff in the stdlibs that I didn't know about, or even sometimes some subtle feature of the language that I never had reason to explore until now.
If someone asks me if I "learned" python, id say hell yeah - but there's always still plenty to learn
That being said, no reasonable definition of learned includes what you could do in 2 days, even as an experienced dev lol
Exactly. I’m 20 years in and I’m still like “I had no idea this was a feature… cool!”
"cool": that sinking feeling that there's so much you could go back and optimize, but that you probably will never have the time to...
Yeah… stuff from last week too 🙃
It' basically the Dunning-Krugger curve - you're well enough into the last part of it so you are well aware of how much there is to learn about it and how you will never know all of it, thus you don't have and never will have the same kind of cocksure belief that "I know this shit" as somebody who knows just a bit but not yet enough to understand how much there is to know.
It's all perfectly normal, IMHO.
The more you learn the less you know.
More precisely, the more you learn the more you are aware of all you have yet to learn.
You do know more after you've learned something, but that also includes the realisation it's but a drop in an ocean of things still tomlearn.
To be fair, i did cover the Fortran 95 spec in a weekend, but i was motivated to tutor aerospace engineerings as there were far more females there than in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
The point is that learning a spec is not learning how to program in the language, just as learning how a violin works is not learning to play the violin. And writing your first few programs is like learning to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Happy Farmer on the violin. You've kind of learned the violin, but you're not getting into any professional orchestras.
Oh i know, was joking mostly. At that point i had half a dozen languages under my belt and for tutoring purposes i was good to go.