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Honestly, once you learn 5 or 6 languages, picking up a new one (not as a deep expert, but enough to functionally contribute to an open source project) takes on

Honestly, once you learn 5 or 6 languages, picking up a new one (not as a deep expert, but enough to functionally contribute to an open source project) takes only a day or so. If you are not there yet, take every opportunity to learn a new language, doesn't really matter which as long as you have a good breadth (e.g. don't do entirely functional languages).

dllthomas 10y ago
> Honestly, once you learn 5 or 6 languages, picking up a new one (not as a deep expert, but enough to functionally contribute to an open source project) takes only a day or so. I think this really depends on some of those 5 or 6 languages being similar to the new one. If I know C, C++, Python, Java, Perl and C#, I'm not going to walk right into Prolog or SML or Scheme. (Your second paragraph is related to this, I just wanted to call it out a little clearer.)
chatmasta 10y ago
This depends on if you are learning a new programming language, or a new paradigm. Many languages share paradigms (the core concepts of OOP are the same in all major high level languages, for example) and only differ in syntax. It's easy to bounce between those languages. But some languages require totally new ways of thinking, and you're not going to learn that in a day if you haven't been exposed to it before. In fact, I would even say this line of thinking -- "I can learn it in a day" -- can be dangerous by causing you to ignore the idiosyncrasies of the new language, causing bugs you don't understand the root cause of. This is a problem you commonly see when experienced programmers start coding Javascript without reading about prototypes, closures, etc.