Comment by aleph_minus_one
2 years ago
> At this point pretty much any language you want to pick for me is a couple weeks’ ramp up time. I couldn’t really care less.
When you learn a programming language for a few weeks, the knowledge will be very superficial. Rather consider a few years of additional learning outside and in addition to the job to be realistic to get a decent understanding of the very encompassing and non-trivial details of the programming language, its lore, its culture and its often huge ecosystem.
> Rather consider a few years of additional learning outside and in addition to the job to be realistic to get a decent understanding of the very encompassing and non-trivial details of the programming language, its lore, its culture and its often huge ecosystem.
Not really, unless you're trying to extract the maximum performance from the compiler, or you're trying to publish your own libraries. You learn Java, C# is pretty close. You know LISP and Java, you can pickup Clojure really quick.
As for the ecosystem, what you need to learn depends on the problem, not on the solution. If you need to do JSON parsing, you take a few days to investigate the available libraries, write your own parser if none exists. That assumes you know what JSON is and what serializing data entails. These are universal problems that exists outside of the Knowing Language X scope.
I'd much prefer hiring someone who can build web applications than someone who knows express.js.
The ideas begin to repeat after a while. I’m a bit of a rolling stone. Most folks tend to specialize but I get bored easily.