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Tips and Tricks When Learning Multiple Languages?

Posted by Cliff on from the don't-get-too-overworked-about-it dept.

BoneFlower asks: "Due to early registrations scooping up most of the good electives at my school, I'm stuck with learning COBOL(required CS class at my school) and Visual Basic.NET (only useful CS elective left) at the same time. The only tips I've gotten from IRC are 'drop one' and 'Focus on COBOL only enough to pass, and put most of your effort on Visual Basic'. I'd prefer to learn both well, do any of you have any suggestions on how to do this? What aspects of each could I use to enhance the other, and what apparent similarities should I keep in mind as dangerous traps? I also have some C++ knowledge, up to basic classes and memory management, so any of that that I could use in the current classes would be useful as well."

3 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. COBOL.NET by Atomizer · · Score: 4, Funny

    With .NET it doesn't matter what language you use, so in this case the obvious thing to do is to learn COBOL.NET.

    I saw some scary examples of it in the .NET seminars.

  2. The "Real World" way to do it... by Bald+Wookie · · Score: 4, Funny

    Write all of your assignments in COBOL. Even the ones for your VB class. No matter what it is, implement it in COBOL first.

    Go party. Hard. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas hard. Once your dorm room is full of bats start renaming variables and stripping out comments. If you can still remember what you wrote and why, you didn't party hard enough. Don't keep a backup copy of the original COBOL. That's cheating.

    The night before a VB project is due, dust off the corresponding COBOL. Now all you have to do is port the heavily obfuscated and undocumented COBOL to VB. You can even get extra points for realism by getting the prof to change the project spec sometime midstream.

    Once you've turned in your VB project, look back at the COBOL source. By now it should look like a bizzare cross between the tax code and naughty refrigerator poetry. The night before your COBOL project is due, start backporting it from the VB. Bonus points are awarded for targeting an ancient punchcard based architecture and then updating it to meet the project requirements.

  3. Re:Concepts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Perl is next on my list

    You may be in for a surprise :)