Schliemann's method of programming language learning
- by DVK
Background: 19th-century German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann was of course famous for his successful quest to find and excavate the city of Troy (an actual archeological site for the Troy of Homer's Iliad).
However, he is just as famous for being an astonishing learner of languages - within the space of two years, he taught himself fluent Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and later went on to learn seven more, including both modern and ancient Greek.
One of the methods he famously used was comparison of a known text, e.g. take a book in a language one is fluent in, take a good translation of a book in a language you wish to learn, and go over them in parallel. (various sources cited the book used by Schliemann to be the Bible, or, as the link above states, a novel).
Now, for the actual question.
Has anyone used (or heard of) an equivalent of Schliemann's method for learning a new programming language? E.g. instead of basing the leaning on references and tutorials, take a somewhat comprehensive set of programs known to have high-quality code in both languages implementing similar/identical algorithms and learn by comparing them?
I'm curious about either personal experiences of applying such an approach, or references to something published, or existance of codebases which could be used for such an approach?
What got me thinking about the idea was Project Euler and some code snippets I saw on SO, in C++, Perl and Lisp.
