New concept, old language. New language, old concept

Posted on Jun 15, 2008

So this is something I just bumped on while reading Monadic Parser Combinators. After reading a few pages I thought I should do this practically. Unconsciously I decided to use Python. I could very well have used Factor, since it is more functional.

This led me to realise that I should take one thing at a time.

Two new things at a time == frustration

I'm already finding Factor pretty tough. Its got a really hard curve and some of the concepts which simplify the language need some pretty solid comp. sci. education. Implementing monads or parser combinators in it would have been horrible, because I don't understand them either. It can get very very frustrating, it's like writing a science paper in, say, German when you're just learning in it.

Frustration kills learning

But I'm comfortable with Python. Except for a few things I haven't tried (decorators), the language and its limitations are known, and logic flow emerges naturally.
So I'm free to concentrate on absorbing
the new concept instead of trying to make it fit to the language.

What all the above verbosity essentially wants to say is that it's hard to learn two things at once.