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I know it has probably been said a million times before, but I have found that in many contexts, trying to tackle problems in a purely-functional style has helped me immensely. To that end, learning languages like Scheme and Haskell forced me to think of programs in a more algebraic fashion -- so many things can be accomplished in a concise, readable, maintainable fashion using basic functional concepts like function composition/bootstrapping, closures, and higher-order functions. Furthermore, because much of it is typically referentially transparent, code written in this way is often fundamentally "safe" in the sense that it lacks side effects, making it much less likely to segfault or do catastrophically bad things. Thinking in a functional fashion also made it easy for me to pick up JS and start writing event-driven code almost immediately, because so much of modern JS relies on proper understanding of closures and asynchronous events. Furthermore, if you find you like functional programming, I also highly recommend teaching yourself Church's basic untyped lambda calculus; I found that it helped give me a much better understanding of the basic underpinnings of so many languages. Similarly, having an understanding of the fundamental concepts that underlie all programming languages -- such as the differences between call-by-value and call-by-reference, or static and dynamic scope, or the various kinds of OO systems (prototype-based, class-based, mixins) -- is really important. My knowledge of these has not only made it really easy for me to pick up and learn a language extremely quickly, but has also saved me on more than one occasion from a pitfall that I would have otherwise made (such as forgetting that older versions of Perl use dynamic scope by default). Also, as many other people here have mentioned, coding up solutions to problems from ACM competitions, Project Euler, Google Code Jam, etc. is a great way to get good at just coding. It is also a great way to familiarize yourself with a language. |