No tricks or tips, but your post reminded me of a professor I had in undergrad. My man had been in computer science since before the name was invented... he sta

No tricks or tips, but your post reminded me of a professor I had in undergrad. My man had been in computer science since before the name was invented... he started out as an aeronautical engineer (worked on the B-52 and Boeing 707, which were fascinating stories in their own right), and got into computing through some of the early aeronautical simulation work. He was well-known for starting to illustrate something in Java or C (or whatever the nominal language for the class was), then, about 5 whiteboards later, he'd be writing in Lisp or FORTRAN, then go back to Java to wrap it up. Awesome professor, though. Language wandering aside, he gave some of the clearest explanations I've ever encountered.