Learning different languages

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

Rich wrote:
> Anyway, my question is: what experience you people have with working
> with different languages at the same time?

At any given time, I'm doing a fair amount of Python and C work.  I
also do a lot of bash scripting for supporting frameworks.  Beyond that
I use a fair number of domain-specific languages depending on the
problem at hand (SQL, XSL, etc).  And from the shell I'm often doing
one-offs in sed/awk, etc.

> I'm more thinking about Python, PHP, C++, Perl, Euphoria, which are
> languages I'm thinking of learning now. They look much more like each
> other than basic and MC, at places some even share the exact same
> syntax it seems, so your brain might get confused with what language
> you're actually working with?

It seems like it's not much of a problem in practice.  I will
occasionally find myself using wrong-languages constructs for things so
simple that my brain is on cruise control (a simple for loop or
conditional) but usually catch it before I'm even done typing the line.
 And for anything that requires any amount of thought it's just not an
issue.

Interestingly, I do some work on remote servers with minimal support
infrastructure (bare vim w/o syntax highlighting, auto-indent, etc) and
it doesn't seem to hurt much as far as "wrong language" goes.  It's
generally more language-independent features that those features help
catch (unbalanced parens, typos, etc).

> How is your experience with handling these paralell?. And what would
> you recommend - take one (or perhaps two) at a time, and then continue
> with the next? Or is it OK to go ahead with them all, at once?

I would probably recommend _learning_ one language at a time until
you're pretty comfortable with the basics.  But learning a language (as
opposed to the libraries, which take longer to get familiar with but
are much less likely to be conflated) is a pretty fast process.