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posted by janrinok on Monday April 07 2014, @02:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-forget-more-than-I-remember dept.

I've historically always tried to stick to one or two big languages, because as soon as I start deviating even for a week, I go back to my primaries and find that I, humiliatingly, have forgotten things that anyone else would be completely incapable of forgetting. Now, I'm going to be learning assembly, since that kind of thing falls in line with my interests, and I'm concerned about forgetting big chunks of C while I learn. I already often have the standard open in a tab constantly despite using C since 2012, so my question is, how do you guys who are fluent in multiple languages manage to remember them? Have you been using both for almost forever? Are you all just mediocre in multiple languages rather than pro in one or two?

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @04:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @04:13PM (#27593)

    Some job interviews require you to sweat the small stuff though. e.g. write a simple working C or C++ program on a whiteboard without looking stuff up...

    I can't do that and I'm not a good coder so I'd rather not work for such places anyway. BUT I often have a good idea of what should be done though. For example in a previous workplace I had just joined the company and they were discussing what a new system should do before it figured out which port a client was attached to. They were initially on the side of showing something to the client ASAP in the interest of responsiveness. But I said we shouldn't - it's much better to wait first. We avoid showing clients the wrong thing[1] and we avoid race conditions. Fortunately I managed to convince them to do it that way.

    [1] Yes initially we may only need to show all clients the same thing no matter what port they are on, but once we build the system that way it's harder to change it later on if we need to do things differently. Plus we still can't let clients do anything further till we figure out what port they are on anyway, so we gain little, and the users might get confused and complain (see first page immediately but not be able to do stuff). Better to not show them anything first.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 07 2014, @04:28PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 07 2014, @04:28PM (#27604)

    "Some job interviews require you to sweat the small stuff"

    Invariably the kind of place that puts you thru a wringer writing a syntactically correct python implementation of a B-tree is the kind of place that wants you to write RoR CRUD apps. Not that there's anything wrong with Btrees or CRUD apps or python or ruby, its just the presence of that kind of stuff implies the actual job requirements will have nothing to do with the interview, which makes your intel gathering way harder. Its a bozosity bogosity warning indicator. Might still be a nice place to work, if only their interviewing is screwed up. But, certainly a warning sign to keep a look out.

    So ... I read my Sedgewick and my Knuth now wheres the completely unrelated job that entitles me to?