It's nice, when doing actual work on a language you have zero experience with, to have a clear intuition about what to expect and what to search for and to feel

It's nice, when doing actual work on a language you have zero experience with, to have a clear intuition about what to expect and what to search for and to feel confident that you'll be able to get things done based on having done it with so many other languages before. If it's not too unusual, it feels similar to other tools you've picked up before. If it isn't it's interesting. Something like: "Oh, OK, Swift has a switch right? Yeah. Does it require me to explicitly break? Yeah. Can I give ranges or patterns? That's cool, they use named parameters in Smalltalk style, probably comes from Objective C, right? Nil! charming, like Golang or Pascal. What do you call these ?. and !. 's? Reminds me a bit of ?. in JavaScript. It's nifty: you can enforce a value not being nil or specify a default.. Hmm, these guards are interesting, how do they work... Etc " So obviously you need to get someone to check for footguns in your code, but after enough playing with toys you tend to get to a place you can write solid code in a new language very quickly, and where getting to a solid level of competence is relatively quick.