how to learn

Posted 2009-04-09 22:55:31 by Jim Crawford I've never been able to pick up a new technical skill by sucking down a book; I need a project to provide a concrete and practical impetus to give me a reason to learn. But now that I'm older, the project itself needs to be practical. A toy compiler won't cut it. (Note that for my purposes, entertaining-to-other-people counts as practical, but by contrast, a toy compiler would be entertaining only to myself.) For instance, I'm fascinated by Erlang and I want to learn it, so I've been trying hard to come up with a fun-yet-practical project to build with it. The closest I've been able to come is an OpenGL implementation subset, which fits the tool and would be a lot of fun to make, but fails the practicality test hard; the world so does not need another mediocre software renderer. Still want to learn it. Still racking my brain for an appropriate project. ... maybe it would help if I had a seriously multicore CPU to take advantage of. [link to this] [See more on “life”]

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