Learning New Programming Languages | Brian Kernighan and Lex Fridman

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Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University. He co-authored the C Programming Language with Dennis Ritchie (creator of C) and has written a lot of books on programming, computers, and life including the Practice of Programming, the Go Programming Language, his latest UNIX: A History and a Memoir. He co-created AWK, the text processing language used by Linux folks like myself. He co-designed AMPL, an algebraic modeling language for large-scale optimization.

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[Frymando]

I got to see Kernighan speak during college. Had him sign my copy of the "C Programming Language" too. So cool to meet him.

[gabrielnilo]

"Hello world" is haunting me....
Doesn't matter the language, it always begins with it.

[TheMinchio]

Learn at least a language from every programming paradigm (procedural, object oriented, functional, logic), and then will be easier picking new languages. A language usually comes down to a paradigm, which is just a way of thinking, once you are able to think "in that way", you can practically pick any language under that paradigm without any problem.

[RoninMiyamotoMusashi]

Great watch. I need to get myself one of these to relive the good old days.

[MohitSharma-hyst]

2:41 the watch that Brian is wearing says it all

[keithprice]

I have this feeling now. I am just getting comfortable with JavaScript and React but I want to learn Python, Golang, Dart etc. There's always that shiny new language, framework or library sitting there waiting to be learned and used.

[uthoshantm]

1:55 "I did it in Haskell, it took several weeks" LMAO. That language gave me such a hard time, just to scratch the surface. I guess it's hard to unlearn programming prior to learn Haskell.

[sfyire]

Would be interesting to know what his example is I wonder if I could get it to sub 15 lines in Clojure without code golf

[louisgjohnson]

Rust has quickly become my favourite language

[mcorleone]

exactly, you have to have something you want to do first

[XenolVlatriX]

what project should one try to do whenever learning a new programming language

[rallokkcaz]

Kerninghan dissing Rust is what I needed to hear. The docs and community are still subpar. I've tried to write rust like 7 times over 6 years, it's always been a time consuming mess. Even Haskell was easier for me to study, and that's saying something

[amirsayyar]

Been coding in js (react and node ) and java (spring boot) and swift for about 3 years. University made me hate c and c++ eventho i know they are wonderful languages

[freedapeeple]

I'm way out of date, so I suppose things might have changed, but in my experience, once you know one the others come easier and easier. Regular languages work that way, too; the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn a new one.

[xc]

All the top languages you can learn the basics quickly if you already know a language unless it like assembly or brainfuck

[tylerstarlock]

Swift has a very bright future ahead of it.

[francisdelacruz]

Learn Assembly, then C then C++. The only way you understand how computing really works and see what language you really need to learn after. But then optimization can only be done usually in C or Assembly you'll be busy with that where pay is higher usually. Maybe you should then improve Python because it's just soo sloowwww....The hardcore programmers usually works in C or C++ where you can work on OS, compilers drivers, GPU computations, game engines, compute libraries....that's at the heart of computing.

[bright]

Everything in the rust world changes so rapidly 😆

[wessmall]

He has a Casio watch you can get at Walmart lol

[mrkvk]

I did projects in C, C++, C#, python, java, Pascal, basic, php, assembler for x51 and AVR processors and VHDL. And I have to say, that If I was to write something right now, I would be confident only with C and C#. I somehow find it hard to remember all the syntax and quirks that some languages have, especially if I don't use that language for a longer time (and I don't, because I work as hardware engineer).