Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
I think that it helps a lot to have a daily practice of using a language for small things.

In much that same way that many people do the daily wordle or crossword, I do the daily leetcode.

I flip a coin and solve it first in either C++ or Python, then re-write my solution in the other one.

Usually it takes me around 20 minutes to solve it in either language, and 5 minutes to re-solve it in either language.

Recently I decided to start learning emacs lisp. This is an imperative lisp dialect that’s pretty different from scheme, but I think that the particular language doesn’t matter much for this process. I could a bit biased because I do have prior experience with SML and scheme.

I started re-solving the problems a third time in emacs lisp. And I’m still learning but I’ve felt my comfort with the language increase over time, and I expect that if I continue doing this then I will eventually reach parity with C++ and Python.

Currently it takes me about 20 minutes to re-solve a problem in emacs lisp, because I usually have to read documentation and/or look up something new.

loading story #48261817
loading story #48260873
loading story #48260169
loading story #48259277
loading story #48260414
{"deleted":true,"id":48257909,"parent":48257767,"time":1779635656,"type":"comment"}