Yesterday I was caught in a fix, a dreadful situation that I am certain many have come across but my certainty doesn't provide for ways to get out of or alleviate its impact nor doest it tell me of individual ways to see-it-coming and halt it right there, neither. I may sound alarmed, but justification is what follows and a requirement for useful tips and directions is what I seek.

This particularly involves the monks among you who use more than one programming languages in their work. I was introduced to SAS sometime before Perl, I reached a nice level of understanding its different language structures and concepts and used to work my way through the many procedures it had to achieve something purposeful, it was nice and fun. Today I don't know if it is mastery anymore that I thought I possessed, I haven't used SAS, however, for ~4 months. Back to yesterday again, I heard of a new SAS community that holds the sort of interactions the likes of StackOverFlow, I happily joined in, and then tried to answer a simple post, to my consternation, my fingers just couldn't type and my mind stayed blank,and dude(tte) I wasn't caught in the moment and it seems like I forgot the syntax!.

What betook me then was enormous to describe, and in the inside of my mind I have been thinking about this; All the love I have for Perl, every time I check a Monk's node and find that that Monk hasn't been around here for 2 or 5 or 7 years and I'd sadly wonder, where they are and what has become of their Perl programming skills and if I would get to walk down that path ever would I forget the syntax, would it rust with length of unuse, and I feel while I am in the middle of such thoughts that it would be a darn world outside the confines of the Monastery, so I stop thinking and haste back to try to reply to a freshly submitted post or get to contemplate the Monastery.

It is a frustration to not be able to retain information after all the dedication and enthusiasm spent picking it, I don't wanna say I forgot SAS (Retrograde Forgetfulness), but I would wanna know how do you manage to transit between two disparate programming languages and how do you strive to keep abreast without sacrificing one for the other.

Would ye revered monks be caught in such a situation at times?, how would you cope to retain and compartmentalize your programming tools and how would you push the refresh button on a programming language you haven't probably used in a while in response to an immediate stimulus like the one I had yesterday and not fail like I did?

Excellence is an Endeavor of Persistence. Chance Favors a Prepared Mind.

In reply to Dirge (Retrograde Amnesia) by biohisham

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