Learning. It ain't hard.

“I don’t have enough free time to learn a new language!”, or tool, or framework, etc. I hear this often. I appreciate we all handle things differently, but here’s my take on it.

I remember years ago, some friends and I were talking about money and our savings accounts. They were flabbergasted at how I, a 19 year old at the time, were able to have nearly £10,000 saved (sadly which I’ve since spent!). I explained that it’s easy to save money if you do it slowly and consistently. £50 a week over the course of three years adds up. Obvious, right?

You don’t sit down and decide “I’m going to save £10,000” and then promptly spend one month working yourself to death to put away the whole amount in one go. It’d be nice to have the option to do that occasionally, but that’s not how most of us work. The same applies to learning.

You don’t need to read a 300 page book to learn something. Read a blog post (or an article, mailing list thread, commit discussion). One. Pick a subject and read a single article on it. Do this once a week, every week. That’s it, that’s my secret to learning.

Knowledge isn’t a substitute for experience, but it’ll certainly get you a lot further down the road, faster, than you would get without it.

Take Ruby as the typical example. Ruby on Rails has been around for 6 years now (and Ruby for nearly 15, but not visibly), if you’d have read one article on Ruby a week, you’d have read 312 by now. Three hundred and twelve. Combine that with the occasional Sunday afternoon playing around and I’m confident you’d be pretty proficient by now.

• Javascript is around 15 years old.
• Haskell, 20 years.
• Erlang, 25 years.
• Python, 20 years.
• Clojure, 4 years. Scheme? 36 years.

Of course, we’ve not all been trying to learn those languages for as long as they’ve existed. Consider this though, in one year you could be proficient in a new language if you commit to just 15 minutes a week, or you could be in exactly the same place you are now still unable to find time to learn anything.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Addendum: but everything moves so fast!

No, it doesn’t. It just feels like that from the inside.

Learn something fundamental and your knowledge will transcend trends. Learning a new language is a great way to do that whilst also feeling cool and trendy. Ruby or Python will help you understand dynamic languages, Scala will make you appreciate how powerful and unobtrusive static languages can be, and Clojure will introduce the code-as-data mindset. All those things will be useful beyond the scope of the language you’re learning.

Stealth edit: Fixed my amazing saving ability.