master a programming language

I will forever be a web standards geek, and keep up to date my html and css, but I won’t bother learning anything beyond that, except maybe PHP.

I tried. I was a computer science major. And it just seemed so… thankless. I wanted to do something. Something that would constantly change and challenge me, and not in a minute bug that you have to search for for like 5 hours. I wanted constant BIG change that required me to do more and more and more and constantly adapt.

So I quit comp sci. I have a basic handling on C. I know the history and logic behind programming languages, I can still count in binary, etc etc, but I really don’t care. I DON’T CARE.

So I’m majoring in Psychology. Yes.

Ok, I’m going to declare myself a Java master. I’ve been all over Java 1.5 for the last few weeks and have done some pretty crazy things. And I’ve used a lot of the API now. I can now say that I can sit down and confidently program up some Java without the API specs in that great ACM programming competition comming up realy soon now. (Od course, they’ll throw some wierd formatting thing at me I’ll have to look up and I’ll eat my words.)

This may be a “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know” kind of thing, but I know a lot of languages, some of which I have been using for a long time. Even when I’m programming in C I still find myself looking for documentation on some library function. Of course, I think I’ve mastered English, but I still look up words in the OED sometimes.

i have done a bit of programming in basic, bash, c, python and common lisp. never really wrote any bigger program in any of them. getting really serious about either common lisp or python would be a natural next step.