Channels ▼  Al Williams  Dr. Dobb's Bloggers  Cheap Threads  May
20, 2011  I always wish I could focus on a single "kind" of
code, but I don't seem to have that luxury. Although I've gotten
used to it, I find it mildly disconcerting to switch gears from
Microchip assembly language, to Java, to PHP, and then over to C
code on an ARM processor.  One thing I have noticed, though, is
that it is actually easier to make big shifts than it is to make
little shifts. So switching between C++ and Java is murder.
Switching between AVR assembly code and Java is trivial because
it is clear you are in a different environment and you just
context switch.  The same is true for switching classes of
computers with the same language. When you are writing C++ on a
big 64-bit Linux box, you develop certain habits. Those habits
can be hard to break when you downshift to GCC on a little 8-bit
processor like an AVR. Sure, it's still C++, but you can't do
things the same way and you have to mentally shift gears.
Sometimes you just h