Syntax may be trivial, but writing idiomatic code in that language isn't. Back in the late 90s for a class we had to write all our assignments in both Java and

Syntax may be trivial, but writing idiomatic code in that language isn't. Back in the late 90s for a class we had to write all our assignments in both Java and C++. The syntax translation was trivial. So in your sense, yes it was trivial. But a professional C++ programmer would have designed their program a lot differently than the professional Java programmer. Simple syntax translation isn't good enough here.