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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: 2) by Common Joe on Monday April 07 2014, @08:06PM

    by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Monday April 07 2014, @08:06PM (#27722) Journal

    I think I'm mediocre and nothing special, but my previous employers really liked me. I rely a lot on IDEs to help me remember syntax because I don't have enough space in brain to remember little stuff like that.

    I keep copies of O'Reilly's [oreilly.com] (I like their Java series) and APress [apress.com] (C#) around. Wrox [wrox.com] was pretty good a number of years ago, but more geared for beginner programmers so you had to wade through more pages to get to what you wanted or needed. I've since not really bought from them in a while.

    The reason why I like books is because they have whole chapters dedicated to topics like basic syntax, inheritance, exception handling, events handling, multithreading, file I/O, etc. I've never found Google able to give me one place to go with good, organized information about any of these topics in a specific language. When I need to get into something hip deep, I pull out the proper book, read for a while, then dive into the code so I know the pitfalls. Googling after reading a chapter or while reading a chapter can help supplement information too or give me further examples to look at.

    You ask a great question and I'm glad to find out that I'm not alone. I forget a ton of stuff and frequently look stuff up. There were many days when I kept that Java doc open constantly. (I always hated MS documentation, though. I usually looked in my books or went online to find the answers.) Typically, I only remember where to look and where really bad pitfalls are in specific languages.

    I wish more perspective employers took note of this question and the answers that are being given by the experts here. I'm looking for a job and employers seem to want experts in all sorts of crazy languages with perfect memory recall and perfect online presence and no life and... sorry. I'll get off my soap box. I'll just say this kind of expectation from those that sign the paychecks are driving me nuts right now.

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