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New language motivation

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Quite frankly, I'm the type of person who wants results instantly. I'm very physical, hands on type of person. I find myself to learn best when I can accomplish moderately difficult tasks very soon after learning something new.

I'm curious about other people's motivation when it comes to learning a new programming language. What do you do to keep yourself wanting to practice and learn more?

I've been trying to incorporate learning C++ in to my daily routine but I always end up falling out of it and never getting around to learning more. I'm not sure if my lack of interest is myself wanting to keep using C# or not.
 
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I think I'm going to give PHP a shot. Never got too deep into web dev, so why don't you try that out, too? :p:
 
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Why Use F#?
"
It will be obvious to a small percentage of .NET programmers that learning a functional language for the .NET Framework is a positive step forward in writing powerful software. For the rest, the motivation to learn F# is a complete mystery. How do developers benefit from F#?
Writing safe concurrent programs has become a principal concern in the past three years, as multicore CPUs have become more widespread. Functional languages help developers support concurrency by encouraging immutable data structures that can be passed between threads and machines without having to worry about thread safety or atomic access. Functional languages also tend to make it easier to write better concurrency-friendly libraries such as the F# asynchronous workflows, which I will examine later in this article.
Although it won't seem as such to programmers deeply steeped in object-oriented development, functional programs are often simpler to write and maintain for certain kinds of applications. Consider, for example, writing a program to convert an XML document into a different form of data. While it would certainly be possible to write a C# program that parsed through the XML document and applied a variety of if statements to determine what actions to take at different points in the document, an arguably superior approach is to write the transformation as an eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) program. Not surprisingly, XSLT has a large streak of functionalism inside of it, as does SQL.
F# strongly discourages the use of null values and encourages the use of immutable data structures. These together help reduce the frequency of bugs in programming by reducing the amount of special-case code required.
Programs written in F# also tend to be more succinct. You actually type less, in both senses of the term: fewer keystrokes and fewer places where the compiler must be told what the type of the variable, arguments, or return type must be. That can mean a lot less code to maintain.
F# has a similar performance profile to C#. However, it has a much better performance profile than comparable succinct languages, in particular the dynamic and scripting languages. And, like many of the dynamic languages, F# includes the tools that allow you to explore data by writing program fragments and executing them interactively"
 
Ginger by design.
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If you want to learn a functional language, learn the grandaddy, don't learn the great great great grandchild that has become retarded.

F# sucks for the same reason the rest of the .NET languages suck. They're marketed for work far outside of their scope, and the availability of a hugely bloated library to do "whatever-you-want" perpetuates this shenanigans myth and makes bad coders think they can be good coders. Sun started this with Java, Microsoft just continued it.
 
Newbie Spellweaver
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honestly am curious how people get motivated as well to start learning a new programing language. :/ cause i've got no motivation eyther >.<
 
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At least for me, I need to have a goal. Just learning anything about C++ on a daily basis wouldn't work. So maybe picture the ultimate project you would want to be able to do, then split it into so small pieces that you can pretty closely imagine what you need to learn to accomplish it. Or simply try and blindly take on the whole task and learn as you go - if you have to rewrite it all a hundred times it doesn't matter, because it was only for learning, anyway.

With some things the motivation comes from knowing that no one else (that I know IRL, at least) possesses the skill, or does it as well as me.

I don't really think anyone should learn a language just because they want to learn the language. It's like wanting to remember the first 1000 decimals of pi, it might sound like fun, but you're quick to give up without a sense of purpose (at least I am). Figure out why you ultimately want to be able to program in that language, and the rest will come to you.
 
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