Brian Kernighan said...

Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia. One of Alan Perlis's many wise and witty epigrams says, "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing". On the other hand, I would not suggest Cobol as a primary focus for most people today — I learned it as part of a summer job and long ago, not because it taught me something new (though it did that as well). No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code, and rewrite it, and see it used, and rewrite again. Reading other people's code is invaluable as well. Of course all of these assume that the code is good; I don't see a lot of benefit in reading a lot of bad code, other than to learn what to avoid, and one should, of course, not write bad code oneself. That's easier said than done, which is why I stress rewriting.

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