Right. Once you’ve learned one or two developer languages learning another one isn’t all that hard. Going from object oriented to procedural based development is a big paradigm shift in thinking. But, I think the biggest challenge in using a different language is the frameworks.
I went from Xojo to Go and I can’t tell you how many times I said, “well, shoot. This is a 5 minute Xojo problem,” and I spent 5 hours figuring it out in Go. If I knew the Go library/modules as well as I know Xojo framework it would have been a 5 minute problem as well. Over the years I’ve tutored/helped many developers new to Xojo who struggle to figure out the Xojo frameworks coming from their language of choice/experience. A former coworker switched from Xojo (15+ years of Xojo experience) to C# and struggles with .NET framework as well. THAT is, I think, the biggest issue with going from dev environment to dev environment.
Frankly, it’s one of the things that I’m not happy with about API 2. It threw away 20 years of muscle memory on an API that I knew like the back of my hand. I knew which ones were 1 based and which were zero based. I knew most of the gotcha’s. With API 2 I know none of that and probably won’t because I don’t foresee our company EVER converting our sizable project to API 2 because it would take several years of effort (and who wants to rewrite what works?).
I don’t think age has anything to do with it. I’m 58 and have retired, but I don’t think there is a language I can’t pick up pretty easily. I’ve done machine languages (no not assembly) for multiple 8 bit CPUs back in the day, 16bit assembly languages. I’ve done Pascal, Fortran, C, C++, Objective C, AppleSoft Basic. QuickBasic, VB, C#, .Net, dBase, Clipper, JS, PHP, MySQL, MSSQL, Xojo (web, Desktop API 1 and API2), Lisp, I’ve even dabbled with and likely lots more I’ve forgotten about. I don’t particularly find changing languages difficult, I know others do, but it would be a bad world if we we’re all the same.
Not at all. Just old. Things change over time, 33 years working in software you have to change languages from time to time. I would think anyone who worked back then would have much the same sort of history.
