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Norris2k on 16 March 2014
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mai said:
Soleron said:

After you understand what programming is meant to do, picking up another language is a half day with a book or online guide. What's more important is whether you've used the language on a real project with tangible results.

Pretty much yes.

I've learned a couple and made a living from programming during my study at university -- was supposed to be a linguistics graduate, but ended up as an engineer :D

It depends what you call language. If it's just doing crappy code for basic stuff, it ends more and less the same with any language.

If you really get into the language, there are tons of tools, coding difference, frameworks, popular coding way, philosophy, web server, debug, editors and goal differences that takes just years to get.

I'm quite experienced in java so I got to know frameworks and libraries (hibernate, spring, dozer, poi, junit, ehcache, etc., etc.), web servers (websphere, tomcat, etc.), the visual editor (eclipse), tools (maven, tomcruise, etc.) etc. Basically, java is a lot about having a good understanding of open source and OOP, set a lot of xml files and is strong for web site and web services (even if you can make games). You can read most of the code you get.

I have switched to C# a year before, and if the language is quite similar, there are not so many performant open source frameworks (compared to java), the editor is a joke (you have to pay for resharper to get half what eclipse can do), the language is faster, so you end to code a lot more technical code. For that you have a lot of windows specific, some convenient language tricks (like linq that most people use massively). One of the example of things I struggled for, is that most of the code is closed source. I'm used to read a lot of code to understand, I read JDK, I read libraries.  That where my understanding come from. That's really a big difference I think. There a hell lot of subtle differences also (can you add a null value in a dictionary as you can in a java's hashmap ? ). So I spent a year learning and coding, I even have a better level than most people in my company, but it took months, and it's not even over.

At the university, I learnt C, Delphi, Pascal, prolog, perl, korn shell, caml, etc., etc., but that's a totally different level. Understanding a language is about coding several hundred hours.