For those who went from one language to another that were wildly different, how did it work out? Any advice/tips?

3    17 Nov 2016 18:07 by u/IAmTheOneWhoHonks

I live and breathe Java, but I'm trying to branch out to get a better understanding of more languages. C# and C++ came naturally despite all the heartache I heard about them, but when I try to tackle the "simpler" languages such as Python, or LUA I find myself tripping over issues constantly like declarations and whatnot. What languages gave you heart/headaches?

13 comments

1 u/heygeorge 17 Nov 2016 18:17

French. So many "false friends" from English that I find it difficult to speak or write fluently.

Also, welcome back to VOAT! Where have you been hiding?

1 u/IAmTheOneWhoHonks [OP] 17 Nov 2016 18:20

Work tore me up lately. Getting tired of Reddit, and looking for a place for more organized discussion than 4chan. Where does it show my last activity time on here?

1 u/heygeorge 17 Nov 2016 18:23

Your profile SHOWS ALL! I'm pretty stupid about programming, so I hope you get some legit responses.

1 u/IAmTheOneWhoHonks [OP] 17 Nov 2016 18:25

Hey thanks for the reply. I'm trying to get that sweet sweet submission point level to create a subvoat.

2 u/heygeorge 17 Nov 2016 18:27

Try reminding everyone that MSM is lying and that Hillary is a cunt. You should be right as rain in no time!

1 u/IAmTheOneWhoHonks [OP] 17 Nov 2016 18:28

Hahaha, thanks for the advice.

1 u/DrBunsen 17 Nov 2016 19:06

Matlab gave me headaches. The inability to typecast and random changing of variable types made my life a hell. I wish it was a bit more strict.

1 u/Antikaon 18 Nov 2016 09:11

Wow, I thought it was just me....

For the last 17 years I've routinely needed to work with Pascal, C, Java, Perl, PHP, Bash, SQL and JavaScript. On my own time I've done projects in C++, and I've even started writing an OS kernel (C and Assembly) that, so far, boots, handles keyboard input and has VERY basic memory management.

But I still just can't seem to get into Python.

0 u/ThatCuckoldSpez 26 Nov 2016 06:19

Because its a shitty version of Perl dressed up as Java without any of the ridiculously useful features of scripting languages

0 u/Master_Foo 20 Nov 2016 22:29

One might argue that these languages aren't "wildly" different, but I went from C++ to D and the results were fucking amaziballs.

Why? The core concepts of D isn't much different than C++, but the workflow is much more streamlined. Most of the things you absolutely HATE about C++ have been addressed. For instance, in C++ you are constantly reaching in the back of your mind to pull out some esoteric knowledge that only the greatest of greybeards possess. In D, for the most part, you can just do what you want without searching stackexchange for hours.

If you are thinking about trying new languages, I'd definitely look at D. Especially if you are using Java and hate it. It's basically a "better Java without a virtual machine".

0 u/WhatWouldOdinDo 01 Dec 2016 22:18

I've went from C# to Perl to Ruby to Groovy/Java to Swift and currently transitioning to C. I can say with certainty that Java has earned a special amount of hatred in a corner of my heart. The tooling sucks, the documentation is haphazard (some of it good, the rest is a fucking minefield), the memory management and configuration for the tasks we used it for was a nightmare, and good luck finding validation for use cases.

We were using it to script things in JMeter, so that probably had a lot to do with it. I much preferred Groovy, but it's even worse on the memory side of things. The more modern JVM is much better about things but if you're confined to 1.7 then good luck. Also, each Java process needs to be kept to <= 500 threads or bad things happen, which we didn't really know at the time. Really, this is why it's good to have one or two team members with really deep knowledge about a platform.

I think the language is less of an issue than the target platform honestly. So long as you have good library and framework support the language barely matters.