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As an old programmer myself, who has learned many languages over the years, and written programs for pay in most of them, learning languages in a day or week is
by MaysonL 15y ago
As an old programmer myself, who has learned many languages over the years, and written programs for pay in most of them, learning languages in a day or week is not at all unusual, or difficult. Especially after learning assembly for a few different machines, with widely different instruction set architectures.
- amackera 15y agoIt probably depends on how we are defining "learned". Does it mean memorizing all the functions in language x's stdlib? Is it learning the grammar of the language? Is it coding a project of x many lines of code? Have you learned a language when you can write a compiler / interpreter for that language? The concept of "learning" a language is so hopelessly ambiguous it has almost no meaning to me. I would say that I know enough of many languages to use them professionally, but I have deep knowledge of very few.
- glassx 15y agoI believe that "learned" means "learned enough to work professionally with". Deep knowledge of a language is always very desired, but on the real world very few programmers have it, or even need it. (Not to mention that "deep knowledge" is a very abstract concept on its own too, lol) Not every professional developer can, for example, write a framework or a compiler from scratch in their language of choice, but they're still productive and fundamental to their team...
- Peaker 15y agoTake a look at Agda (http://wiki.portal.chalmers.se/agda/pmwiki.php http://wiki.portal.chalmers.se/agda/pmwiki.php) and tell me if you could "learn it in a week".