The most important lesson that I have learned in my career of almost 15 years in software development is that programming languages are just tools to solve real life or business problems. About 5 years ago I was doing full time .NET, then I jumped to Java for about two years, then I switched to Ruby and Rails, and just recently I started using Kotlin to create two microservices (don’t ask me why, the business needed it ;)).

Because of this, there is no point whatsoever to be bound to a language/platform religiously. The languages are tools but it’s the core knowledge of computer science and software development practices that prevail.

These changes have been inspired by different rationales, sometimes influenced by the employer and sometimes by the economic conditions of the runtime environment. E.g. hosting a Java web application during 2006 was way more expensive than a PHP application, therefore, I used PHP as a primary language for my web facing pet projects. So during my career so far, I have used Java, .NET, PHP and Ruby as my core languages and also have implemented small solutions using Kotlin, Javascript, and Python.

To adapt to this changing environment of ours I have noticed I had created a framework, which I call my language learning framework. The framework itself is not about the language per se, but about the whole ecosystem around that language. It came as a result of identifying unchanging things around any language ecosystem. E.g. no matter the type of language, there is a way to deal with strings, numbers or arrays. Or the language has some sort of collections.

With almost every language that I have used, I have had the need to also learn a framework to develop web applications, a framework to do testing, and other common things around the application. So out of this experience, here I share with you my language learning framework. It lists the things I try to learn or pay attention to when I start learning a new language.

I. Language
1. Runtime & ecosystem (general knowledge)
2. Syntax
3. Data types (if there are types)
4. Main constructs
4.1. packages/modules, classes and methods/functions
4.2. loops & conditioning
4.3. arrays
5. Core libraries
5.1. String manipulations
5.2. collections (lists, arrays, maps, sets)
5.3. math (rounding, sqrt, pow, PI)
5.4. important packages/gems/etc. and any language/platform specific library
II. Frameworks
1. Application development (evaluate popular ones and pick one)
2. Testing (unit & integration)
3. Main design patterns and in that language
III. Toolset & Other
1. IDE platform specifics
2. CI/CD
3. Deployment (does the docker & Kubernetes work or is there anything platform specific)
4. Community
5. important learning resources

Some of these items on the list are dead clear so you just follow it, but some of them are hard, like choosing which framework to use. How do you choose which framework to pick. Well, in those cases, I use different inputs to make my decision but most often it is an educated guess. What I consider is, I ask my colleagues/friends if they have experience with any of the ones I am considering and get their opinions. I also evaluate possible blog posts about them and also try to measure the popularity by checking the number of contributors, how often does a major version gets released, how many job openings I find requiring that framework, and based on all these inputs I narrow my list to two options. Then I try both of them with a certain simple scenario and I try to evaluate how easily I could implement that scenario and get a feeling of both and then decide. Out of all the factors I consider, how much I like it and how many job vacancies are there requiring that framework are two criteria that weigh most with me. The pleasure to work with is very important for me, but also having an opportunity to use it (have an employer/business which actually uses the framework) is also important in my opinion.

One important thing is, when I try to jump on a new language, I try to do all these steps in a relatively short period, potentially with max 2-3 months, and then try to repeat it at least 2 times with 2-3 sample projects. In this way I make it possible for my brain to remember it, otherwise, if it takes too long to go through the list, I forget things in between and the end result is not satisfactory.

This is not a definitive list and doesn’t include everything we need to learn to be productive in one language/platform, but it certainly serves as a good starting point for me when I want to jump into a new language.

Do you have a different approach? Share with us!