(no subject)

I'm wondering how much of the same neural circuitry is involved in learning spoken languages and computer languages. I can see lots of parallels here, but as I've never managed to successfully learn to speak another language[1], I'm not entirely sure.

I can speak PHP already to an extent - I'm basically fluent in it, but I have the equivalent of a really thick accent and a decent vocabulary that requires looking a lot of things up to figure if there's a short term that does what I want this really long paragraph to do. I'm learning ASP now, and it's far easier than it would have been two years ago because I now know the basic logic behind the coding, but as I code now I'm thinking in PHP and having to translate to ASP, which involves a lot of looking things up in books. Admittedly a lot of my PHP coding involves looking things up in books, but I'm looking up more complicated things and I'm looking up bits and pieces of things that I'm knitting together in my brain to form complex functions, while in ASP I'm looking up incredibly basic grammar and vocabulary. To worry that metaphor a bit more, PHP and ASP would be Romance languages - somewhat similar to my own and similar enough to each other that they share much of the same logic and knowing one helps you understand a bit of the other. In which case, would would be the comptur-language equivalent of Japanese? Or does the metaphor completely break down?

In an ideal world I expect that learning computer languages would help my brain retain spoken languages, but I doubt that's the case, more's the pity.

[1] I chalk this up to the fact that the way you learn to speak another language is to actually speak to other people in it, and I have problems with thinking of things to say when speaking to people in my own language, it's doubly hard to sit there and think of what to say, translate it into French or Italian or whatever, and then say it.

(no subject)

My last few entries are mostly whinging and complaints because the thing that's been taking over my life currently - TEH_SEKRIT_PROJEKT - cannot be talked about. So not much happening in my life other than that. That being said, on to [Unknown site tag]today's ASP whinge

OK, the primary reason I post in my journal about coding problems is that I've discovered that often the act of writing the problem down helps me fix it. Of course, it's got to be actually sent *to* someone; I can't just type it into a random document on my computer, it seems that there must be someone to be annoyed on the other end for it to work. [1] I don't think LJ works quite as well as annoying my friend Toby,[2] but it'll have to do.

Anyway, the current problem is that in this calendar app I'm working on, it works perfectly for days that have entries on the calendar. But when there's a day *without* any entries, it throws an error when closing the recordset:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01a8'

Object required: ''

/www/sfolse/calendar_test2.asp, line 231

This is line 231: objRS2.Close

objRS2 is created for the query that pulls the events from the database, and the events on days that have them display just fine, it's just on days with no event, so that there are no records in the recordset.

I'm thinking that it's panicking because there are no records in the recordset, but I can't figure out why it would do that, and there don't seem to be any explanations in my books or online that say "If your recordset is empty, do XXX." So it's entirely possible I'm wrong.

[1] I think that it probably has to do with forcing myself to explain it all from the beginning when writing to another person - when writing for myself, I bet I take shortcuts or something that keep me from being able to work through the logic.

[2] Toby: Why are you asking me this? You know more PHP than I do!
Me: Shut up. That's not the point.



OK, 5:00, time to go home and plunge back into TEH_SEKRIT_PROJEKT