While I agree that one probably doesn't gain much from "Hello Word" in many languages, I don't think learning new languages is always linear. Many languages ove

While I agree that one probably doesn't gain much from "Hello Word" in many languages, I don't think learning new languages is always linear. Many languages overlap a lot, so switching from Java to C# or vice versa takes much less time than switching from C to Smalltalk. Given that learning a fundamentally different language takes one year, I'd argue that 10 would only take 3-4 years, as there are probably not 10 such "corners" in the programming language space.