Total Immersion - how to learn things (including programming languages)

This Substack post Don’t build to-do apps (substack.com) by Ilango Rajagopal has at least three major ideas in it. The first is:

I call this the "total immersion" programming method, which I have stolen from the human language learning method of language immersion (wikipedia.org).

The idea is that after you’ve read a little bit of documentation and try a "Hello World" or two, then go straight to writing a real program that solves a real problem.

It could be a port of an existing program (you know the concept is sound, so it’s just a matter of figuring out how to do it in the new language). Or it could be a brand new program that has a well-defined problem and solution.

It’s self-motivating and you’ve got something to show for it in the end.

This solves the Game Manual Problem because everything you learn to solve the problem is immediately applicable and intrinsically interesting.

See also: applied-learning and learning-vs-doing or just learning.

By the way, the other two cards directly inspired by Rajagopal’s Substack post are:

See also: