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Speaking all the languages
Phil Staiger, who talks about Tips and Techniques with Project Dogwaffle, can speak (as I recall) at least six languages. Working for an American company (Megatek) out of San Diego, his role as roving technical expert had taken him all over the world, and had him talking with people from many countries. I recall a great admiration when, across in California to learn the technical stuff company's graphics products and libraries so that I could take over the European support, I watched him switch from Spanish to English to French in successive sentences. I really wondered how he did it and all the technical stuff too. I understand English (and write it only up to the standard you'll find in these jottings), and I have a smattering of French. I always struggled with Latin at school until allowed to drop it, after which the struggle ceased. I did no more than wonder about learning Swedish at one point. The motivation, incredibly, was a work role and not a blonde, but that is a story for another day. Any yet I find myself programming and switching - "á la philip" - from Perl to PHP, then a bit of Tcl and some C before doing a bit of awk and perhaps ruby.. Looking at Philip's web site and links, I see he's talking Lua with Dogwaffle and, sure, I can do the Lua thing too. So - somehow - I'm on the other side of the fence with this switching capability that baffles others and people ask "how do you do it". I'm afraid the answer is a very simple one. All programming languages are based on the same underlying concepts. For sure, they're all implemented differently, but you've still got variables, and blocks, and conditionals and sequences of statements. Named pieces of code, loops, and some sort of collections. An ability to load more bits of code, shared between programs, from common files. A way to add comments to your code, and ways to read information in and write it back out. I'm suggesting that you could say there is really only one language - it's just implemented with a different set of grammars, and basic elements that are tuned very differently ... thus giving rise to languages which are strong in one area or another, and providing foundations on which you can ideally build one type of application or another. You see ... really ... I still just know one language. It's the language of programming. Now Phil - he's clever - he knows the language of speech in depth too. (written 2009-01-12, updated 2009-01-13) 23fa Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles G908 - Well House Consultants - Language Comparisons[3785] Programming languages - what are the differences between them? - (2012-06-27) [3169] Rekeying a table - comparison in #Ruby #Perl and #Python - (2011-02-14) [3112] Public and private courses - subjects available for 2011 - (2010-12-29) [3003] What will we be teaching in six years? - (2010-10-17) [2947] Teaching Lua to a Perl advocate - (2010-09-06) [2866] Ruby - how does it compare and where is it the right language? - (2010-07-11) [2755] Books in the store in the USA - still a portent of the UK market to come? - (2010-05-08) [2700] The same very simple program in many different programming languages - (2010-03-31) [1717] Q - Should I use Perl or Python? - (2008-07-23) [1582] Ruby, C, Java and more - getting out of loops - (2008-03-19) [209] FAQ - Perl or PHP - (2005-02-11) Q102 - Choosing your language [3764] Shell, Awk, Perl of Python? - (2012-06-14) [3619] Ruby v Perl - a comparison example - (2012-02-21) [3558] Python or Lua - which should I use / learn? - (2011-12-21) [2536] All the Cs ... and Java too - (2009-12-13) [2535] When should I use Java, Perl, PHP, or Python? - (2009-12-13) [2507] Admission - (2009-11-19) [2048] Learning to program in PHP, Python, Java or Lua ... - (2009-02-19) [2001] I have not programmed before, and need to learn - (2009-01-19) [76] Learning to program in - (2004-10-07)
Some other Articles
tomcat-users.xml; what a difference a space madeLoad Balancing - Hardware or Software? A good time to travel Rules for a King Speaking all the languages So sad to see you go Melksham, Wiltshire. Town Crier Competition, 2009 One Cheer for Local Democracy - Asda in Melksham Walk to Bowerhill Learning to program as a part of your job |
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