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Poll: How long for a top quartile programmer to be proficient in a new language?

7 points by fnazeeri ↗ HN
I'm not a programmer (unless you count my Fortran 77 experience from my undergrad days), but it seems to me that programming languages have a half life of about 3 years. So I'm wondering, are there benchmarks, rules of thumb or perhaps just anecdotes on proficiency?

5 comments

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dpkendal
Once you know two languages of fairly dissimilar syntax and philosophy, you can learn a new language pretty quickly because of the mind-expanding effect brought about by having multiple approaches to the same problem in mind.

This applies decreasingly with every language you learn, such that the usefulness of learning a new language to learning future languages is governed by 1/(n-1), where n is the new number of languages you will know after learning the new language. (Naturally applying this to one's first programming language results in a division by zero, because knowing the basic skills of programming is infinitely more useful than knowing nothing about it.)

stdcinout
proficient: I would say it normally takes a month for people to be proficient.

expert: years...

getsat
You'd have to define "proficiency" first. If you already know other languages sharing the same paradigm(s), you can start writing real programs very quickly and just constantly reference documentation.