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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: 5, Interesting) by iwoloschin on Monday April 07 2014, @04:35PM

    by iwoloschin (3863) on Monday April 07 2014, @04:35PM (#27610)

    ...but you're doing the same thing, regardless of how the library works, right? In which case, it's just a case of knowing where to look up the reference.

    I did a large project at work a couple years back with embedded C. I had used it before, about 5 years earlier, and had spent much of the intervening time in MATLAB. Some things were the same, others (like typed variables or strings) were completely different and very sad to relearn. But I knew what needed to happen in each case, just not how to do it, which meant it was a matter of finding the correct reference. Now I'm moving to "embedded" Linux projects (think BeagleBone Black), which means I can be "lazy" and use Python, hardly an embedded language. Setting up an interrupt in Python is much harder than a true embedded system, but it's a matter of figuring out how to do it, then adapting the examples to what I need. There's a lot of other things you need to learn (like how is a GPIO pin mapped into userland in Linux), but the concepts are the same, assuming you understand the basics of interrupts.

    Your professors were right. Maybe slightly off scope, but in general, I'd agree with them. Then again, my only formal programming training was AP CS in high school. After that, I went to school for an EE degree and I've learned programming on the side...so to me all software is just another tool to get the job done.

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