Ask HN: What does it mean to learn a new programming language?

Re:Ask HN: What does it mean to learn a new programming lang... by whitten on Friday March 25, 2022 @12:41AM (#30798716)

It’s been said that a diehard ForTran programmer can write ForTran code using any programming language.

I’m sure this applies to any language that a diehard programmer chooses to focus upon.

It would be nice to have a idea what techniques a language focuses on providing. Perhaps some kind of Rosetta Code site might be a place to pint this kind of information.

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Re:Ask HN: What does it mean to learn a new programming lang... by AlchemistCamp on Friday March 25, 2022 @10:00AM (#30802250)

It only works if you're moving to more powerful languages.

You can write Fortran-style code in Ruby, but you definitely can't write Ruby-style code in Fortran. It just doesn't have powerful enough of abstractions.

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Re:Ask HN: What does it mean to learn a new programming lang... by warrenm on Friday March 25, 2022 @09:50AM (#30802138)

First time I wrote something of "substance" in PHP (and it was only "substantive" in that it was a couple hundred lines long instead of a handful of individual calls in a web page), my supervisor told me, "I see you're a C programmer."

All because I used strtok() instead of explode().

The language you start with will affect your thinking for a very very long time :)

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Re:Ask HN: What does it mean to learn a new programming lang... by GianFabien on Friday March 25, 2022 @01:47AM (#30799037)

I have had to write string manipulation code in FORTRAN77 - an absolute pain. Moving to C was a relief.

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