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Tips and Tricks When Learning Multiple Languages?
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."
i took three programming courses one semester and learned fp, ml, prolog, lisp, clos, vax assembler and ada. in addition i had some projects in modula-2 and c. and you're worried about cobol and visual basic? come on, yer just messing.
study, play with the langs and generally learn.
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Any place that considers COBOL a requirement, and Visual Basic worth spending course time on, is seriously out of touch with both the academic and business worlds.
Most of the giant COBOL shops killed off their COBOL dependency during the Y2K fixup. COBOL programmers with 20 years of experience are a dime a dozen now. Most people I know with COBOL experience don't even bother putting it on their resume.
Visual Basic is so trivially easy to master that it hardly requires a college course - a good manual and an on-line or CD tutorial should have you up to speed in two weeks or less.
A school with a good program would be requiring C, and offering perl, C++, Java, python, and some more esoteric languages like Eiffel, Lisp, Icon, or such.
Given no other choice, I'd skimp on the COBOL and practice the VB; you can use VB at home when you get a job as a Salesdroid, or use it with MSWindows in a mid-level management position.
Programming is something you know or you don't. Sure your skills improve over time, but there are some basics to that activity that won't change with different languages.
During a programmer's lifetime, you will have to learn a lot of languages, and frankly, if you know how to program, you can learn a new language in an afternoon, and get to be an expert after a month or so working with it.
So this is my advice: Choose a project for each of the languages, realize it, and you will know both of them well.
(I have to admit I never learnt COBOL so in a way I don't know what I'm speaking of. In another way, in my life I have learnt Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Visual Basic, JavaScript and all that stuff, and I got easier every time.)
Most languages tend to have 3 basic building blocks:
... then) ...)
1) Assignment (a = 1)
2) Conditional (if
3) Loops (do while
Everything else around it is syntactic sugar and what really defines the language.
The syntactic sugar basically manages the complexity of the program (it does not make things less complex).
What I normally do is learn how to do those three things first and get a simple program that does something like
a = 10
while (a > 0) {
if (a > 5) {
print "greater than 5"
}
else {
print "less than 5"
}
a = a - 1
}
Then I learn how to do procedures if it is a procedural language or how to do objects if it is OO. I tend to go to procedural first if it is supported since it is easier to learn and deal with.
Next thing I learn to do (if needed) is the memory and pointer stuff. Nowadays I do not deal with it since most modern languages already handle it for you.
By this point, I now have the basic framework of the language itself. However, it does not stop there.
For any task that is given to you, you should always think that it should've been done before. So its quite helpful to get a searchable reference handy. This is basically the key thing.
For example, I won't implement sort myself, I would use qsort() in C or the std::sort() in C++. Nor would I implement a stack or other simple data structures, I usually expect them to be there now, of course I still adjust to the language and I still remember how to do it anyway, it will just take some elbow grease.
To paraphrase the Perl reference, there are 3 virtues each programmer should have... laziness (don't implement what you think should be standard), impatience (keep the reference guide with you when you are coding, its the fastest way to get at the information), hubris (well that just builds up as you get better and start getting A+'s)
Good luck!
Archie - CIO-for-hire
I'm a CS major as well, and I know what it's like to learn many languages. I took a class called Programming Language Concepts (PLC). We learned LISP, PROLOG and Simulink(not really a language) in 10 weeks. The way I learned them so fast was to focus on the concept, not on the language itself. This has proved useful especially in the object oriented languages.
Once you know the concepts behind a certain type of language. Say object oriented languages. You know things that are true about every object oriented language. There are classes, methods, public, private, exceptions, threads, locks, static stuff, polymorphism, inheritance, etc. Once you understand all of these things, every object oriented language should come easily to you. It took me awhile to learn C++, and a little less time to learn vb, then java. I learned C# in a matter of days, and I learned all of the basics of python in a few minutes this morning (no joke). Perl is next on my list.
Get a book on object oriented/event driven programming. And get another book on procedural programming. Learn the concepts behind the languages, and not the languages themselves. The syntax and the API will be most of what you have to learn when picking up a new language. And those are things you can just reference repeatedly until you memorize them.
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"Due to early registrations scooping up most of the good electives at my school..."
Maybe instead of worrying about programming languages, you should use an elective to learn about effective time management. Knowledge of all the programming languages in the world will not keep you in a job if you can't get to work on time and think ahead about projects.
This is sort of echoing many of the other comments here, but my personal experience:
I had some compulsory courses in a variety of odd languages when I was at college, and originally thought it was a total waste of time. I mean, Modula-2, Poplog (Pop-11), 68k assember and a bunch of others so obsure I don't remember the name. They're ancient! I was itching to get onto the C/C++ stuff so I could start some "real" programming.
It was only afterwards that I realised the extent of the knowledge and skills that had been subconciously implanted into me - among them the ability to pick up a new language and learn it quickly. When it came to learning C++ - it was a snap.
My job requires use of C++. However, if I hadn't been in the mindset of exploring other languages, I would never have learned (on my own time) Python, Lua and x86 assember. They're more suited than C++ for many tasks, and have used them both in my work (for auxillary tasks) and my hobbies.
There's never a danger of knowing too many languages.
Make a comparison table between both languages, listing similarities and differences, and features which exist only in one or the other language. This way, when you think about both languages in terms of differences, you are less likely to mix them up, but at the same time, best leverage similarities in your learning.
Trying to create a good structure for that table is probable alone going to give you some insights into the structure of programming languages!
When you're done, be nice and put your table up somewhere on the web, might be helpful for anyone coming from COBOL wanting to learn VB or the other way round. One never knows.
Stupidity is mis-underestimated.
Good CS school programs have almost nothing to do with specific languages. You need to spend some time learning the discrete mathematics and the fundamentals of languages. When you learn that well, picking up the little quirks of a new language is easy, and you are a more versatile programmer.
I would recommend some courses in compiler design. That will give you a good understanding of grammars, languages, and programming constructs.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Learning programing languages is trivial to a programer. Learning how to use any on to the best advantage can take years, but all you do in those years is memorise more and more library/template procedures and the gotchas of useing them. If you cannot learn both well enough to fool the teacher, then you should not be in CS.
When I took CS the only language course that was required tought 12 langugaes in 10 weeks. It wasn't a big deal, we learned the syntax, and how to do some simple things (a binary tree or simlear) and moved on. Of course we were just told what the "standard library" was called, and told if we really used the language to look it up, because it will save a lot of time.
Come to think of it, other than the one class that covered 12 languages, we wre simply told in class to submit assignments in such and such a language, and if we didn't know it (and the introduction class was tought in Scheme in large part because it was likely we didn't know it!) we were expected to pick it up on our own. In this was I knew 3 of the 12 languages tought in the languages class when I could finially get into it.
In the course description of Cobol there was a warning "CS student may not take Cobol for credit". The same line was in the description of Fortran and C. A CS student should pick up anything that a class on a language can teach on their own. A CS student is expect to spend their time learning data structers, algorithms, and other things that make the different between someone who can bang out a little ugly code when needed, and someone who can take requirement and turn out a maintanable program in as few line as possible.
Judging from your comment about how Visual Basic is the only useful elective left, that leads me to think this is your senior year. If you're an upperclassman and you're having trouble with COBOL and Visual Basic, find another major.
COBOL and Visual Basic are both pretty simple imperative languages--the simplest form of language to understand. (Yes, VB has objects nowadays, but it's usually used in a mostly-imperative fashion.) Not only that, but you already know C++, which supports both imperative and object-oriented programming.
It's not like you're suddenly dropped into an AI course and you have to learn LISP and PROLOG both; it's not like you've been thrown a copy of Ullman's Elements of ML Programming and told you have a test on OCaml in a week. These languages all make you think about problems in a totally new way, and that can take a significant investment of time. But learning imperative languages when you already understand imperative programming should not be difficult. You're not learning anything new; you're just learning a new vocabulary and grammar to express things you already know.
If it'll give you any problems, you should give very serious thought to whether or not you want to make computer science your career. It sounds as if you possess neither inclination nor motivation, and you will probably be a much happier person if you can find a field for which you possess both inclination and motivation.
Generally I don't go for the "one upmanship" stuff of how fast I learned this or that, but in this case I make an exception because when I finished lunch I specifically remember thinking to myself, "OK, I've just skimmed through the book and I'm fairly certain I already know the concepts that will be presented during this semester." This was in the early 80's, I think my second semester in "college", and I had a pretty solid understanding of BASIC, a non-trivial amount of (z80) assembler, and a dabbling of "other languages" [APL, fortran, etc.]
I had picked up the required book from the school's bookstore, went to lunch at the aforementioned BK, and started looking through the chapters. It didn't take long to realize that some things were simply renamed terms (table == array) and other things were "syntactic sugar" ("accept" vs. "input") At first, the amount of "preamble" seemed a bit daunting, but in practice that's when I found out how to effectively use a "mainframe" style line editor... :)
One of the BEST things I think I've learned from COBOL is the underlying format of data in a "structure" -- don't underestimate the power of "redefines" or a level 88 variable! Investigate these to learn their "counterparts" in other languages...