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Comment by jordanpg | Hacker News Reader

I just don't see it. No one would ever recommend learning Spanish and Mandarin at the same time, for any reason.

All of the things you said are true, and yet the beginner has only so much time, so much patience, so much learning to do in one day.

Given this, I see larger advantages to spending all of that time and energy in one ecosystem. There are many perspectives on, say, Java coding styles, patterns, and idioms. One need not go outside a language to do that.

And I would further argue that you simply cannot (usefully) see the global commonalities and idioms among languages until you've been doing this for a while. Years.

As for experienced programmers, I've not known any "experts" at 20 languages, ever. My point was really that this idea is simply the result of run-of-the-mill internet hyperbole.

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Learning two programming languages at the same time is definitely not comparable to learning Spanish and Mandarin at the same time...those two languages are so different that you won't gain anything from it. Learning, say, Spanish and Italian at the same time might be a better analogy, since you'll start to see word roots and constructions that are shared among romance languages.

I think learning more than one programming language at the same time is a great way to help you tease out basic programming concepts from the vagaries in the syntax of an individual language. How to types work? Scopes? Functions? Loops? Arrays? Hash tables? Those are all things that, once you really grok as separate from, say, whitespace problems in Python or curly brace issues in C, allow you to much more easily read and eventually pick up other languages.

Although I can't speak to learning two spoken languages simultaneously, learning a language similar to one I already knew (I knew Spanish, tried to learn Italian) was insanely difficult, because my brain couldn't distinguish them enough. It would get in a loop of searching for Italian words and running into Spanish words and then mixing them up.

On the other hand, learning German after already knowing Spanish was much easier -- and it was much easier to see the similarities and differences between the languages, because my brain would find the Spanish phrase while searching for the German one, and vice versa, but wouldn't get stuck in a loop about it.

> No one would ever recommend learning Spanish and Mandarin at the same time

American? :-)

Huge portions of the world (Europe and Asia especially) raise children bilingually.

Which by the way has practical advantages. While the child takes a bit longer to learn those languages, it configures her brain in a particular way that makes it possible to think effortlessly in both languages, from the start.

I suspect, (but don't know) this even facilitates the learning of other languages, later on.

Early programmer chiming in.

I found that switching between languages made the beginner stages of learning much faster. If I got stuck on a concept in one language, jumping to another language often clarified what that feature means. I still use this strategy today.

I learned variables and addition while in javascript, loops and classes in Java, iterators and hash tables (dictionaries) in Python, functions in Clojure, pointers in Go, etc.

Trying to learn all of those things in one language only would have been much more difficult, boring, and I believe I would know a lot less than I currently do.

> I would further argue that you simply cannot (usefully) see the global commonalities and idioms among languages until you've been doing this for a while. Years.

That's assuming you are not shown the commonalities explicitly, and have to figure them out by yourself. A course on programming languages teaches just that, and it takes only a semester (possibly a brutal one, but still).

> I've not known any "experts" at 20 languages, ever.

Lucky you. I've never met any expert, period.

Anyway, expertise in a language is not interesting. You want to be an expert at programming. Then translating your thoughts in any language is easy —including languages you don't know.

My "expert at 20 languages" isn't really an expert in those languages. She's an expert at programming, and proficient in 20 languages. Personally, that's what I strive for. I'll leave language lawyering to the compiler writers. (I may write a compiler someday, but it will be for a simple language of my own design. I have no interest in cancerous horrors such as C++ —which by the way is the language I happen to know best.)

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