Language Notes Repository

So I’ve been interested in expanding my programming languages repotoir, and I’ve decided on a plan to systemize my progress. Essentially I’ve found that if I’m just working on my projects without some sort of defined goal I end up losing interest or going in circles. With something as nebulous as expanding my language repotoir it’s going to be even worse as one can either dig in super deep or just skim the surface. To that end I’ve started a language notes repository which I’m going to dump hello worlds and more for each language I try. The goal is not to master any one language but just to have seen the tool chains and gotten things setup at least once. My idea is to first add hello worlds, then add maybe prime finders, then maybe windowed applications, then maybe conclude the languages on a simple game like pong.

This has had the secondary benefit of making my most used languages chart look weird with a bunch of languages that I’ve used slightly populating my list just because I personally find the idea of it amusing. I may expand my goal of familiarity to say that I want to make each of the languages take at least 0.1% of my public github code simply to ensure that I’m fleshing out my own understanding.

Possibilities

It’s far too easy to gain a bunch of familiarity with a system and then have to walk away for a month, two months, even a decade. Then you come back and can’t remember how anything worked. Notes and note repos are a great way to write things in a setup which doesn’t end with you frustratedly rebuilding your skillset the same slow way that you built it to begin with. Instead you write things in your own words with descriptions of how you did each thing. Even the act of note taking helps some people, but even if not having your own descriptions of the problems should be a minimal problem.

Exercise Plan

For each language I intend to write a handful of items each item I’ll squash into a singular commit, and I’ll try and keep a consistent scheme with regards to my commit messages.

Hello World. Adding the folder for the specific lanugage and a basic hello world application to show how to write to the console.
Prime Number Finder. Find the first 100 Primes, expanding out notes as appropriate to cover things like calling functions, creating variables, and other language quirks.
File Operations. Grab a list of every file either on the drive or below it in the directory tree. Provide some basic stats on that collection of files (Count, Size, and maybe others)
Windows. Possibly adding a user interface to one of the other exercises if appropriate.
Simple Game (Pong, Brick Breaker, PIG) whatever I happen to feel like at the time of creation.

So far I’ve just created a bunch of hello worlds, and one prime number finder for COBOL of all lanugages. So we’ll see how well I actually stick to this broad strokes plans.