Go learn erlang, and otp. It will change the way you think about software development forever. It'll also make you stop saying you can learn any language in a few hours. Really, lisp, Haskell, scala, F#, and others could do that too.
Regarding abandoned projects and such: raw talent is great, but it's not nearly as important as drive, determination, and tenacity. I think it was michaeangelo who said: people rave about my talent, but if they saw how hard I have to work for it, they wouldn't think it so amazing. This is very true. Raw talent and coding excellence is really important. But still, this biggest difference between a true professional and a tinkerer, in all kinds of professions, is keeping on going.
I remember as a kid, I was trying to figure out how games work, by writing my own games. I was writing text adventures and stuff. But I remember feeling unsatisfied; I wanted to write a "real" game with lots of things moving at the same time in real time, like asteroids. How do they do it, I wondered, since you can only have the computer do one thing at a time. I reasoned that it would be possible to do, but the only ways i could think of doing it were a ton, a metric ton, months, of work. So i never really got into serious game development until much later.
What I didn't realize then was that yes, it really is a ton of work to write the magical software that the Professionals write. And that's their main secret: tons and tons of really hard work. Either in figuring out how to make it easy, or in just gutting it out long after it's not so fun anymore, or both.
Yeah, true. FWIW, I was oversimplifying with the coding example -- I'm sure it would take me forever to learn a functional language, but while I love programming, I don't necessarily have the passion for it that would lead to me learning a functional language. I need a reason to learn it, and then I'll love it when I do -- without that reason, I don't really see the point.
And yeah, I probably just don't hard enough at it at home. I wish I didn't have the day job -- if I could spend 8 hours a day working on my own stuff, I'm sure things would be different.
Thanks for your perspective though, it is helpful. I do know the secret of hard work, after all, that's how I got where I am today. I just tend to only deploy said hard work when I'm at work. Though this is changing, I think, as I become less and less attached to my current job. I spent five years personally invested in the AC projects, but now I don't have as much to give on my current work project.
Regarding abandoned projects and such: raw talent is great, but it's not nearly as important as drive, determination, and tenacity. I think it was michaeangelo who said: people rave about my talent, but if they saw how hard I have to work for it, they wouldn't think it so amazing. This is very true. Raw talent and coding excellence is really important. But still, this biggest difference between a true professional and a tinkerer, in all kinds of professions, is keeping on going.
I remember as a kid, I was trying to figure out how games work, by writing my own games. I was writing text adventures and stuff. But I remember feeling unsatisfied; I wanted to write a "real" game with lots of things moving at the same time in real time, like asteroids. How do they do it, I wondered, since you can only have the computer do one thing at a time. I reasoned that it would be possible to do, but the only ways i could think of doing it were a ton, a metric ton, months, of work. So i never really got into serious game development until much later.
What I didn't realize then was that yes, it really is a ton of work to write the magical software that the Professionals write. And that's their main secret: tons and tons of really hard work. Either in figuring out how to make it easy, or in just gutting it out long after it's not so fun anymore, or both.