Initiative

有一篇很老的文章，讲：花10年的时间学会编程

Here's my recipe for programming success:

• Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure
  that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten
  years.
• Talk to other programmers; read other programs. This is more important
  than any book or training course.
• Program. The best kind of learning is
  
  learning by doing. To put it more technically, "the maximal level of
  performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically
  as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be
  increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate
  efforts to improve."
  (p. 366)
  and "the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an
  appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative
  feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors." (p.
  20-21) The book
  Cognition in
  Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life is an
  interesting reference for this viewpoint.
• If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate
  school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials,
  and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't
  enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the
  job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science
  education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying
  brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond,
  author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best programmers I
  ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of
  great
  software, has his own
  
  news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own
  nightclub.
• Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some
  projects; be the worst on some others. When you're the best, you get to test
  your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision.
  When you're the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what
  they don't like to do (because they make you do it for them).
• Work on projects after other programmers. Be involved in
  understanding a program written by someone else. See what it takes to
  understand and fix it when the original programmers are not around. Think
  about how to design your programs to make it easier for those who will
  maintain it after you.
• Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language
  that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that supports
  functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one that supports syntactic
  abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications (like
  Prolog or C++ templates), one that supports coroutines (like Icon or
  Scheme), and one that supports parallelism (like Sisal).
• Remember that there is a "computer" in "computer science". Know how long
  it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory
  (with and without a cache miss), read consecutive words from disk, and seek
  to a new location on disk. (Answers here.)
• Get involved in a language standardization effort. It could be the ANSI
  C++ committee, or it could be deciding if your local coding style will have
  2 or 4 space indentation levels. Either way, you learn about what other
  people like in a language, how deeply they feel so, and perhaps even a
  little about why they feel so.
• Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as
  quickly as possible.

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