Skip to the content.

Programming languages are much more similar than they are different. They all have ways to choose different actions in different situations, to repeat actions for every object in a set (or until a condition is met), and so on. Learning how to break a procedure into manageable chunks and describe it precisely is the main skill you need to program in any language.

So the fact that they all spell their commands differently, or want their punctuation in different places, or enforce “proper” indentation with an iron hand, or dictate that all data must be fixed and if you want to change it you have to make a whole new copy… These things do matter, and when (if) you start on a second language it will seem like the differerences are huge.

But if you focus on what your code does and how it works, you’ll eventually start seeing this as stylistic differences of varying severities: this person prefers to be addressed by these pronouns, that person clings stubbornly to the Oxford comma, the other one refuses to let you use the letter ‘i’.