Language overload
Saturday, July 8th, 2006So I was sitting at my desk today, working on a Python script for work, and I came to the realization that I had forgotten most of the Python that I’d learned in April. Sure, after staring at somebody else’s code for 30 seconds, I got the gist of what I was supposed to write. Still, the first function def and dictionary collection I created was a pain.
Still, at any point from the second I wake up until I go to bed, I can look at C++ or PHP code and just start modifying it without really thinking about it. That makes me think that there is some magical threshold of how many hours a week you have to use a programming language in order to be able to step in and out of it at will. There’s more though: sometimes I won’t do PHP for weeks, but I can still step in and out of it. I’ve got ~1000 total hours of PHP development, so you must have to pass some threshold and then do some minimal effort per week to maintain your knowledge.
The same can be said of spoken languages too. I studied 4 years of German in high school, and after a summer of full immersion, I was conversational. But that was 2001. I’ve visited once since then, but my German’s still in constant decline. Yet, sometimes my host brother will Skype me and just start conversing with me. Perhaps I crossed the same threshold with German that I did with PHP. Much like with my declining German vocabulary, I often will forget how to open a database connection or a socket in PHP (the PHP vocabulary).
Knowing that all of the languages we speak are in constant decline, what the heck can we do to stay fresh in all of them?…especially when we have to learn new ones.
Ruby on Rails is next, btw. Looks promising. I wonder what I’ll forget in its place.