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."

Comments

Re:You're in luck.

[DavidTC]

Heh, exactly what I was thinking. I admit it, I learned COBOL way back when, and, damn, that language is verbose.

LET FIRST-VARIABLE EQUAL FIRST-VARIABLE TIMES 6

I think that's right. And, yes, that's honestly how we were taught to name variables, and type in uppercase.

And our COBOL editor had a 7x column setup designed to emulate punched cards.