Sure, but they're not that different, particularly if you've been around the block a bit and seen a bunch of these. For a reasonable definition of the word pro

Sure, but they're not that different, particularly if you've been around the block a bit and seen a bunch of these. For a reasonable definition of the word productive, I've never found it terribly difficult to pick up and be productive in a new language. Sure, a year later I'll look back and say "man, I was so silly back then" but that's not the same as being useless. We routinely hire people at work who don't have experience in our primary language and it's never been an issue. One of the things that irritates me the most about our industry is the fetishization of the difficulty of switching languages. In my younger days people would say that the syntax was too difficult to pick up. Now that people realize that's hogwash they've moved on to saying that the frameworks are too difficult to pick up.