The title of this post accurately reflects my knowledge of most languages actually, not just French. I could say pardon my Spanish, Russian, Yiddish or any other language. I’m bound by the silly English languish. However, I’ve managed in the last 5 or so years to learn various programming languages at least well enough to get things done in them. Why is it that programming languages are simpler than spoken languages to learn? Often because they’ve got similar syntax or a similar approach to things.

Right now I’m learning C++, a language written in what seems like the dark ages after having used Java, but I’m catching on and I think that its going to prove useful. Its a lot faster than older versions of Java and it can be written rather efficiently as well since many function names are terse and remove all vowels. Of course without vowels you have to play a guessing game about what things like the following mean:

atoi
memcmp // oops, they left a vowel in that one
strcmp
strcpy

However, there’s a secret decoder ring that came with one of my books so I was able to figure those out 😉