4 ms·
Poll: How long for a top quartile programmer to be proficient in a new language?
I'm not a programmer (unless you count my Fortran 77 experience from my undergrad days), but it seems to me that programming languages have a half life of about 3 years. So I'm wondering, are there benchmarks, rules of thumb or perhaps just anecdotes on proficiency?
- JUNIOR19031991 15y agohttp://www.publicidadebr.com.br?ind=1173 http://www.publicidadebr.com.br?ind=1173
- getsat 15y agoWe're even getting Brazuka spam here now? Porra!
- dpkendal 15y agoOnce you know two languages of fairly dissimilar syntax and philosophy, you can learn a new language pretty quickly because of the mind-expanding effect brought about by having multiple approaches to the same problem in mind. This applies decreasingly with every language you learn, such that the usefulness of learning a new language to learning future languages is governed by 1/(n-1), where n is the new number of languages you will know after learning the new language. (Naturally applying this to one's first programming language results in a division by zero, because knowing the basic skills of programming is infinitely more useful than knowing nothing about it.)
- stdcinout 15y agoproficient: I would say it normally takes a month for people to be proficient. expert: years...
- getsat 15y agoYou'd have to define "proficiency" first. If you already know other languages sharing the same paradigm(s), you can start writing real programs very quickly and just constantly reference documentation.