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Remembering Multiple Programming Languages?

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

Subsentient writes:

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?

• Re:Syntax (Score: 3, Informative) by Koen on Monday April 07 2014, @10:42PM

  by Koen (427) on Monday April 07 2014, @10:42PM (#27834)

  A couple of my professors at Uni taught the idea that you can learn how to program in general and after that you just need a reference to the specific syntax to switch between languages. A loop and a conditional statement will look similar in most languages, just with different words and symbols (some might use curly braces whereas some would use BEGIN and END for example). The claim was that relatively little regarding new concepts had been added to programming languages for a couple of decades and that you should learn the concepts and just pick up the syntax when needed.

  That is true if you stick to the Fortran/Algol/C families of programming languages (including their Object Oriented offspring).

  Give a functional [Lisp, etc...], non-imperative language [like Prolog (which is Turing complete but does not have loops: all repetition is done by recursion) or even SQL (without procedural extensions, which is not Turing complete)] or a stack based language [such as Forth & Factor] a try: it will force you to wrap your mind in different ways.

   

  I think their claim makes more sense from an academic point of view, when looking at a language on its own, but nowadays a lot of the more popular languages (in industry) make use of large libraries, which are going to be different for each language they are supporting.

  Popular libraries often have wrappers/bindings for use in other programming languages.

  --
  /. refugees on Usenet: comp.misc [comp.misc]

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