>Those are trivia; you learn to look them up, not spend immense amounts of time memorizing them. I certainly don't remember all 4100 entries in the FoxHelp file verbatim, much less the tens of thousands of API entries in the Platform SDK. This is where the philosophy of STFMB pays off in gold - if you can master the concepts and constructs of the language, and can clearly pose queries to find the trivia when you need them, at some point, learning another language is automatic.
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>The problem comes in having to make the mind shift because of the expressiveness of a formal language. OO is a big hurdle, but at least in theory, we've already made the hard first step by shifting from FP to VFP. In this manner, I feel we've done ourselves a disservice with continuing to provide large-scale backwards compatibility, so that people could be lazy and not make the shift in mentality to master the nuances of OOA and OOD, which are far more difficult to assimilate than OOP.
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>There is a steep curve to certain paradigm shifts; the commonly-quoted number is that somewhere between 20-30% of people who have learned to program in a purely procedural environment never make the mind shift necessary to be really good at OO. We saw some of this already in the switch from FP to VFP 3; the shift from 3 to 6 or 7 is certainly syntactically as complex, involves nearly the amount of lexical content difference and object behavioral difference. But we don't have the dropout rates from 3 to 5 to 6 to 7 that we did from 2.6 to 3.0, because the paradigm shift has already occurred. The rest is largely a matter of how big a dictionary and thesaurus you're carrying around at all times.
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>I'm lucky; Fox was far from my first language, far from my first paradigm shift, and not my first exposure to OO. I'm not saying that picking up a new language is going to be as automatic for the next guy as it was for me, because my background in formal language and pattern analytic techniques gave me a leg up on many people, as did starting to program at very low level at a relatively yound age. But then, I don't have an ear for spoken language; I don't assimilate natural languages just from hearing them spoken for a period of time as easily as many other people. Perhaps there's some conceptual relation between the ability to adapt to new spoken language and the relative difficulty of deciphering formal languages. It might make an interesting dissertation for a cognitive psychologist or information sciences postgrad to work on.
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>That being said, if people approached picking up a second (third, seventh, nth) programming language the same way kids pick up a new language over time when they move to a new culture by immersion and drawing parallels where the constructs are similar would help. It also takes a realization that the way to start learning the new language is simple; I start learning a new language by re-writing "Hello, world", not Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Start simple and build on what you find.

Good points all, Ed. Like you Fox was hardly my first language. Unlike you, VFP was my first OO language. In fact, I went straight to, did not Stop, Pass Go, or collect $200, to VFP 5.0 from FPW not 3.0.< s >

Before I started with VFP 5.0, I did some studying of the OO paradigm and its principles. Strangely, I found them in some ways very familar to the paradigm I already used: Structured Programming. Both shared many of the same purposes (re-usability, for example) and the same means (such as functional cohesion) to achieve that end. In fact, I commented on this to a friend of mine, Tom Gooch, who's a professor of computer science at Kennesaw State University, and he agreed.

I also found that the design methodlogy I employed (Top-Down) seemed a natural fit in OOAD world. So, in short, I didn't find the learning curve anywhere near as steep as others may have.