Learning a new programming language: Grokking syntax vs. paradigms

My journey thus far

I began programming in middle school in BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80 (“Trash 80”) that ran using two 5.25” floppy disks (to be fair, you pretty much had to learn BASIC in order to use the thing). I’m not that old, we simply didn’t have much money growing up so I got ancient computers from places like the Goodwill (the kind that were so old and junky people literally gave them away). I was lucky to have a neighbor/babysitter that taught me the foundations of BASIC, and one of the benefits of learning old tech was that the (typically outdated) library books covered everything I was learning!

Fast-forward more than two decades later and my journey has taken me from various flavors of BASIC all the way through HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, C, C++, SQL, C#, and more. Recently I decided to learn Go. I was torn between beginning to learn Rust or Go, but for reasons that I’ll spare you from, I ended up choosing Go.