If the language does not include drastically new concepts it takes me a couple of days to get the syntax down well enough to be productive. I'm always suspect

If the language does not include drastically new concepts it takes me a couple of days to get the syntax down well enough to be productive. I'm always suspect of people who measure programming skill by the number of languages you/they know. This tells me that they find it hard to pick up new languages and therefore don't really understand the concepts that underlie all programming languages. When I started programming as a teenager, 25+ years ago, I learned assembly, Pascal, Logo and C. In college I learned C++, Scheme and Java. Later I designed and wrote a language of my own, xmlpl, and picked up other languages like JavaScript, PHP and Python. I've played around with a lot of other languages but haven't really used them in production code. There are a lot of cool languages that don't have enough supporting tools and libraries to make them really useful. Here's how to pick up a new language: 1) Locate and learn to use the documentation and toolchain. 2) Learn and understand any new concepts the language depends on. 3) Learn 90% of the syntax well. 4) Use it to write something nontrivial that you are interested in. Notice I did not mention anything about learning the libraries. There's little value in memorizing something you can lookup quickly.