Learning the basics? A weekend. Learning the idioms? A month. Mastery? Heck, I've been programming in C for 15 years and Perl for 10, and I don't think I'm

Learning the basics? A weekend. Learning the idioms? A month. Mastery? Heck, I've been programming in C for 15 years and Perl for 10, and I don't think I'm a master in either. And at this point I can pick up a new language (Javascript, say, which is my current sort-of project) and it's just a matter of learning syntax because I've used that concept in another language before.