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My hack to improve at a new programming language is to read its grammar. We instinctively try to learn programming languages the same way as we would a natural language, bottom up. But unlike natural languages, programming languages have complete grammars that can be read in a session. This will prime you with the right questions to ask ("WTF is an XYZ?").

Doesn't work for Clojure though :)



For Clojure what helped me was starting to read the source. Typically core lib first and then the Java implementation of certain constructs.

For me it helps tremendously to see how the sausage is made.


Not sure if this is what you're talking about, but there's https://learnxinyminutes.com. It's really awesome when getting started with a new language. If you're an experienced programmer, you can get to a newbie-but-ready-to-write-some-code level after a 15 minute reading on a new language.


Not really for Python, either.


You can definitely read it https://docs.python.org/3/reference/grammar.html Though I found it useful only to answer narrow specific questions.




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