(no subject)

[aesmael]

mantic_angel has suggested 5 hours a week would probably work for programming. If anyone can provide an informed estimate of the time investment required to obtain good results from studying Mandarin or mathematics or practicing keyboard (piano), that would be very helpful.

I still intend to search on these things, but it is often handy to have a person available who might be interacted with on the subject - there are often particular details I wish to know which are not covered in print materials and which do not seem readily communicable outside of interpersonal discourse.

As for programming itself, I am reminded that I would need to choose which language to learn, unless I want to try learning more than one at once which seems... something to which the phrase "biting off more than can be chewed" would be appropriate. I am not trying to burn myself out. I am trying to shift into a state of being generally interested and engaged and actively using my brain and doing things which I enjoy. And this does allow for 'vegging out', which is also an important and enjoyable activity and some of these things probably constitute such.

That paragraph sort of got away from me. Was intended to solicit suggestions from people about what programming language I may want to learn, hopefully with reasons why they think it would be a good idea, so I could make a more informed choice. Unfortunately I have little idea what I would want to do with such knowledge; I tend to think ideas for how to apply things come with greater understanding of the thing in question. When I was writing Seeing the Lights I wanted to make a tool which would allow me to match date and day-of-week for Aurora with date and day-of-week for me and better manage / coordinate her time with mine. Would still be interested in such a thing. I am very much ignorant when it comes to programming though, and about the extent of my current skill is using HTML to produce a very basic web page. So I do not know what I am doing and would like the sort of input which I could discuss with people and refine my ideas of what I want and how to go about attaining this.

These posts need a tag. Or an index.

Comments

[syntaxia.livejournal.com]

I suggest you start with Perl. It's not a "programming" language per se, but a scripting language; however, I don't think this matters for you at this point.

Perl is simple and intuitive enough to learn some basics quickly. The advantage of Perl is that there it's pretty forgiving and there are a million ways to encode the same thing. It's used mainly to manipulate data, so you could definitely use it for your date-matching.

If you have any more questions about programming, I'd be happy to help :)

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

To determine what language to learn, first determine what you'd like to do with it. For example, if all you want to do is play around with web pages, you might be happy with Javascript.

[flynnacatri.livejournal.com]

Well, when you find out, please implant the learning into my brain?