Comment by halostatue

> There is no real universal intuition you can build up for programming. There is no point at which you've mastered some degree of fundamentals that you would ever be able to cross language family boundaries trivially.

I don't really agree with you on this, even though I agree with everything else here. Then again, I am an outlier where I've used ~40 programming languages in my career. There are a couple of language families (array languages like APL, exotics like BF) where I cannot read it because I've had no real opportunity to learn them, and there's a significant difference in being able to read a language and use a language (I can read, but not really use Haskell -- although I have shipped a couple of patches to small libraries).

I despair at the number of developers in the profession who understand only one or two programming languages…and badly at that.

(It's worth noting that I wholly disagree with the original post. 24 years ago I chose Ruby over Python because of syntax. Ruby appealed to me, Python didn't — purely on syntax. I never pretended that Python was less capable, only that its syntactic choices drove me away from choosing it as a primary language. I'm comfortable programming in Python now, but still prefer using most other languages to Python … although these days that has more to do with package management.)