One of my hobbies is Model Rocketry. I got back into it a year ago after a 50 year hiatus. I also used to program for fun in Visual Basic and later in VB.net. I learned HTML and SQL2000 to help land a job in software testing. It was a bad time to try to get into the industry. The dotcom bubble had just burst and there were 1000′s of highly qualified individuals looking for work. I did a 2 month internship as a software tester and landed a paying gig at Ortax in tech support. They had just switched from a DOS based program to Windows and everything was broken. I dealt with very angry people 15 hours a day for 2 months. A lot of people were not getting their tax refunds. After that, I went back to being a heavy equipment mechanic.

I use Openrocket for designing my flying model rockets. It calculates the Center of mass and Center of Pressure for you and gives you a nifty 3D model. I have done the equations by hand for fun but they are lengthy and it’s easy to make mistakes. Openrocket also gives you the ability to run flight simulations with different engines.

I was talking to a friend in an online group about the need for a personal engine inventory program. There are hundreds of different engines, from Estes black powder to Reloadable Motor Systems. Your choice of engine will determine altitude.

Openrocket is written in Java. I would like to take it apart and see how it works. I want to use blocks of it’s code in the inventory program. My friend uses Python and wants to build a mobile app. I’d like to learn Java and join the 21st Century. In other words, switch from being a programmer to what they now call a “developer”.

I typically learn by looking up examples of code that are written to do things similar to whatever I am wanting to accomplish and write my code using those examples as a guide.

As a result I get an ugly patchwork of code that is inefficient and uses brute force to accomplish what I want. I don’t really care if I get my answer in 10 seconds or 10ms… I don’t care how efficient it is with memory, my only requirement is that it not crash my computer.

For any language getting to that level of skill is not terribly difficult. However, on some of my projects speed and efficiency of code is critical, I don’t even attempt to do that code, I bring in professional programmers that have spent years learning the craft- That level of efficiency is a skill that takes a long time to develop, and requires learning more than just the language itself… there is no way I am going to get that skilled in my scarce free time.

I have written a lot of code in my time, probably all of it- outside of code I have written for a computer science class- is terrible in nearly every way, the only positive thing you can say about it is that it gets the job done.

Professional programmers do a LOT of work before they write the first line of code- mapping out in exquisite detail the best way to structure the program- that again takes significant education in computer science, not just the language in question. I am not, nor will I ever be, a professional programmer.

So if you want to learn a computer language well enough to accomplish a task- that is ‘easy’, if you want to learn a computer language well enough to do something with maximal efficiency- that takes a LOT of study.

There are lots of resources on the web to learn a language well enough to accomplish a given task- accomplishing that task with maximum efficiency, however- depending on the complexity of what you are trying to do- is something that I would say takes something akin to a formal education in computer science.