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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:I wouldn't worry Re:I wouldn't worry (Score: 2) by threedigits on Tuesday April 08 2014, @07:22AM

  by threedigits (607) on Tuesday April 08 2014, @07:22AM (#28016)

  It's so different that it won't clash with C

  Au contraire my friend. "C" is basically an enhanced version of Assembly. You can think of it as a little coat of syntactic suggar. Learning Assembly will actualy improve his C skills.

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• Re:I wouldn't worry (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2014, @01:09PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2014, @01:09PM (#28117)

  This may be true for early (K&R) C. But for modern C (with type based aliasing rules and all that), thinking too low level may actually cause you to write erroneous programs. For example, the following code is not guaranteed to give you the result you'd expect from knowing your low-level stuff:

  #include <stdio.h>
   
  int main()
  {
    int value = 13;
    short* ptr = (short*)&value;
    *ptr = 5;
    printf("%i\n", value);
  }

  The C standard allows this program to print 13. And some compilers may actually produce code that does.

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