Today someone asked me what was wrong with their source code. It was obvious. ‘Use double equals in place of that single equal in that if statement. Um, I think…’ As I remember some languages actually take a single equals for comparison. Since I sometimes forget or mix up the syntax details among the several languages I use, I stepped over to my laptop to try a quickie experiment.
It costs a bit of time and is a break in the flow to try ‘quick’ experiments (though maybe the practice is good for memory.) What tips do you have for keeping straight in your mind the syntax (and other) details of multiple languages?
(And nowadays, this applies just as well to the many wiki-like markups!)
IDEs that can draw red and yellow squiggles can help, until you develop that mental muscle memory.
One of the annoying things with XCode (for Cocoa/ObjectiveC) is that you don’t get said squiggles until you compile. (As opposed to Eclipse/Java where you get live squiggles).