I was surfing stackexchange.com, and this is what I got: “Don’t waste time on understanding the language. Just find a great IDE with good autocomplete. Ask lots of SO questions. It’s all anyone needs.”
I was like really. Does anyone who wants to be a great developer think this way. I can’t be sure if this person wasn’t making a joke. What do you think about this?
That statement makes sense if you put it in better words. You should be comfortable with language basics like statements, loops, variables, OOP or other stuff, basic syntax. But you shouldn’t try to learn/memorize everything because there’s a chance that you won’t need that knowledge. There’s a real good quote by Albert Einstein: “Never memorize something that you can look up”. I think this quote is really applicable for developers. Sometimes we try to learn as much as possible, like algorithm implementations or some super language thing that is known by a few. But the main question should always be “Do I need it?”. I don’t like learning/memorizing algorithm codes. Instead I search for an algorithm depending on a problem I have and try to find the right solution and then apply the code to solve the issue.
I actually started to code last summer (I had been doing it before but without commitment). I assume I lack clear understanding of what learning concepts is and what it is not.
I am always fascinated with studying how things work under the hood (which is why I am falling in love with YDKJS Book Series). And so, “Don’t waste time on understanding the language” sounds to me much like “It’s enough to see an algorithm giving intended results. Don’t waste your time understanding how and why.” I could be wrong the way I am interpreting this.
What I meant is, most popular languages are pretty simiilar https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/823521695118004224 of course it’s a plus to learn the magic behind the scenes, but most of the time you have to learn the language on the go.