Unless you always stick to languages with the same familiar "look", learning a new language will always need more time to acclimate to. I've used FORTRAN, Tande

Unless you always stick to languages with the same familiar "look", learning a new language will always need more time to acclimate to. I've used FORTRAN, Tandem TAL, C/C++/C#/Objective-C, Java, Python, Go, and Smalltalk. No real problems with picking any of these up, but I always struggle with Lisp. Language design is often a balance between making something terse and something human readable. Smalltalk strikes the perfect balance, AFAIC. Having English-like method names and variables is really quite nice. And Smalltalk still manages to be a lot less verbose than every other language I've ever used.