…in Ten Years.

The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. There are no books on how to learn Beethoven, or Quantum Physics, or even Dog Grooming in a few days.

Let’s analyze what a title like Learn Pascal in Three Days could mean:

• Learn: In 3 days you won’t have time to write several significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them. You won’t have time to work with an experienced programmer and understand what it is like to live in that environment. In short, you won’t have time to learn much. So they can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.
• Pascal: In 3 days you might be able to learn the syntax of Pascal (if you already knew a similar language), but you couldn’t learn much about how to use the syntax. In short, if you were, say, a Basic programmer, you could learn to write programs in the style of Basic using Pascal syntax, but you couldn’t learn what Pascal is actually good (and bad) for. So what’s the point? Alan Perlis once said: “A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing”. One possible point is that you have to learn a tiny bit of Pascal (or more likely, something like Visual Basic or JavaScript) because you need to interface with an existing tool to accomplish a specific task. But then you’re not learning how to program; you’re learning to accomplish that task.
• in Three Days: Unfortunately, this is not enough, as the next section shows.

Peter Norvig tells it like it is.