In my opinion programming is a linguistic skill. A more apt analogy is trying to learn French by reading textbooks on learning French. I spent 5 years teaching English as a foreign language and I can tell you that learning a language from textbooks will not allow you to be "good" at the language when compared to the fluency and proficiency of a native speaker. You will certainly be able to accomplish various tasks and to get your message across to others, but you don't really have a hope of being a "good" speaker or writer of the language compared to even the average child. Your language will be full of tortured constructions that are (hopefully) grammatically legal but idiomatically terrible.
I hope this situation seems familiar to programmers because we see it every day -- programmers who write code that "works", but is tortured in its design. We can see people who can not express themselves in code because they are not fluent enough to do so. We can see people who can not understand common idioms because they never have read other people's code (in quantity). They ivent their own idioms, just like baby talk, and often decide that their baby talk is superior to the living language around them.
The biggest difference between a human language and a computer language is that most people aren't exposed to incredibly fluent users of the language in great quantity. It is really easy to fool yourself into thinking that you are a great programmer, when actually you can just barely make the code work. The same happens very frequently to learners of a foreign language that are rarely exposed to native speakers. You have no yardstick to measure your progress other than your textbooks.
Although I agree with your assesment that you must DO, but even more so you need to seek out communities of fluent users of the language and interact with them. That means reading their code, writing code, having them correct it, etc, etc.
I hope this situation seems familiar to programmers because we see it every day -- programmers who write code that "works", but is tortured in its design. We can see people who can not express themselves in code because they are not fluent enough to do so. We can see people who can not understand common idioms because they never have read other people's code (in quantity). They ivent their own idioms, just like baby talk, and often decide that their baby talk is superior to the living language around them.
The biggest difference between a human language and a computer language is that most people aren't exposed to incredibly fluent users of the language in great quantity. It is really easy to fool yourself into thinking that you are a great programmer, when actually you can just barely make the code work. The same happens very frequently to learners of a foreign language that are rarely exposed to native speakers. You have no yardstick to measure your progress other than your textbooks.
Although I agree with your assesment that you must DO, but even more so you need to seek out communities of fluent users of the language and interact with them. That means reading their code, writing code, having them correct it, etc, etc.