HELP! Must choose language!

[Kyler Laird]

grante at visi.com (Grant Edwards) writes:

>It's often interesting to write the same program in two
>different languages, but I don't know that it's required.

I was recently a guest teacher for a Fortran class that was
assigned to rewrite their largest programming assignmenet
(a simple calculator) in Python.  It was strange to see
Fortran rewritten as Python.  (I'm told that the teacher
has a tough time getting the students to write in Fortran
after this exercise.)

One of the best things I noticed a student do was that
since he didn't know how to do something in Python, he
implemented his need (I forget exactly what it was.) using
a piece of Python that he did understand.  (Think in terms
of implementing a dictionary as a list.)

While this might seem like a failure to adequately learn
the language, I thought it was great that he was thinking
about how to work around a feature missing in (his 
understanding of) a language.

To me, a big part of learning multiple languages is getting
exposure to different ways of thinking.  Then you can
implement a solution using whatever language is available.

--kyler