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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."
This is just an idea, I've never tried it: how about taking simple programs and trying to implement the exact same program in each langauge. Oh sure, VB and COBOL are very different and the interfaces will no doubt be different, but looking beyond that, trying out the same exercise in each language could teach you a lot about them both as you see how they are similar and different. Using a common problem domain will allow you to focus on the differences in structure and syntax. I'm not suggesting trying tough projects here, just simple exercises: memory management, arrays, search trees etc.
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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did i learn all the ins and outs? no. but i learned enough to do my projects. and i learned some other things along the way - how to learn languages, how to work with a language, how to get information on a variety of tools and how different languages have cultures around them.
:)
that last part is hard to explain, but a good example might be perl - cpan, perlmonks, perl mongers and naming conventions. back then it was just newsgroups, but even those had their own conventions.
you'll learn the depths of languages later on - primarily when you get a job programming. first learn what exists - though cobol and visual basic would admittedly be rather vile choices. kinda fun learning fp and vax assembly at the same time. fp had not variables or control structures; vax assembly was practically c!
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With .NET it doesn't matter what language you use, so in this case the obvious thing to do is to learn COBOL.NET.
.NET seminars.
I saw some scary examples of it in the
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.