Want to Be a Better/Faster/Smarter Programmer? Learn a New Language!

For years most of the projects I worked on were written in C. I thought I was a pretty good C programmer. Then I had to move fully into the Java world. I grumbled a little because I was no Java expert, but once I learned it I found I would much rather write Java code than C. But you know what else I discovered? When I did go back to writing or maintaining C code, I did it a little differently. I took a more object-oriented approach and wrote more re-usable libraries. (Like my vector.c module that emulated Java's Vector class.)

After a while I began to learn Ruby and that's when several ideas that should have already been ingrained really started to click. I realized that handling exceptions like this:

try {
some_method()
} catch (Exception e) {
write_to_logfile(e);
return false;
}

is almost always WRONG. You should be probably be throwing that error up the stack to be handled at a high level.

Ruby's awesome Test::Unit module woke me up to value of automated unit testing. Instead of doing unit testing as an afterthought, I began thinking about unit tests much earlier in the process. I've learned to use JUnit for Java and even written tests first and the class second a couple of times!

Coding Ruby has got me wanting to write small, easy to test classes made of small, easy to test methods, and modularize to a degree I haven't in the past.

As a result of better modularization and unit testing, my Java and Ruby classes are much more reliable from the moment of release and require far less debugging (and apologizing to users) post-release.

What next? Erlang! What a great languange. And what a great book Joe Armstrong has written in Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World.

I'm not yet writing production code in Erlang, but now, whatever the language, I'm seeking more elegant solutions using recursion, thinking more about concurrency and shared data, doing actual top-down coding, and trying to think of solutions functionally.