Re:Don’t “Hire by Keyword”
by outworlder on Monday July 25, 2016 @04:55PM
(#12161559)
> THIS. After learning a few languages and paradigms, I find that I often have a 2 week ramp up for any given programming language.
That sounds about right for many programming languages. My personal average from "having heard of the language" to "writing non-trivial programs" (let's say, something that is able to talk to a REST API and do some processing) is a non-stop weekend programming session. [1]
The time-consuming part is learning the libraries and how to write idiomatic code. That can take months or years (C++, I'm looking at you).
Still, knowledge of a specific programming language is usually the wrong thing to optimize for. Perhaps a more useful metric was the number of programming languages one has been exposed to? That is more useful, as once you have learned a bunch, you've seen most of the important concepts, and can focus on whatever subset is implemented by the new language.
[1] Except Haskell. That's a nut I still haven't cracked.
That sounds about right for many programming languages. My personal average from "having heard of the language" to "writing non-trivial programs" (let's say, something that is able to talk to a REST API and do some processing) is a non-stop weekend programming session. [1]
The time-consuming part is learning the libraries and how to write idiomatic code. That can take months or years (C++, I'm looking at you).
Still, knowledge of a specific programming language is usually the wrong thing to optimize for. Perhaps a more useful metric was the number of programming languages one has been exposed to? That is more useful, as once you have learned a bunch, you've seen most of the important concepts, and can focus on whatever subset is implemented by the new language.
[1] Except Haskell. That's a nut I still haven't cracked.