[SimonPStevens]

I used to arrogantly think I could be productive in any language given a week or so to adapt. I often used the phrase "a good dev is a good dev in any language." That belief was rather abruptly broken when I joined a project using C++/CX it was so far outside of my previous experience that I had a really bad time of it.

I happily picked up the actual language very quickly. It was the surrounding ecosystem of compilers, build tools, debugging tools, libraries, standard patterns and best practises that was too deep for me to become proficient in.

That said. Learning every language you can is definitely beneficial. Just don't expect to hit the same level of productivity in all of them.

[lacampbell]

C++ is a special beast though. It's famously complex.

What gets my goat is the idea that some recruiters have that I - as someone with mostly C# experience - would be completely useless in a Java environment.

Java and C# are so similar it's barely worth noticing. There'd be different IDEs and libraries in play - and sure, a lot of googling to remind myself of stuff in the first week. But that pales into the comparison to the amount of time I'll likely spend learning the business domain, or how the legacy code base works. That's the stuff that's truly important.

[imdsm]

I agree. It's not always the language which makes it tough to integrate yourself into a project, sometimes it's all the frameworks, libraries, build tools, and general makeup of the project itself.

I worked for a company a few years back doing ASP.NET (my experience is mostly Linux based tech, but you can pick up a language, right?). The language was fine, the design patterns used all quite standard, but the project had an array of frameworks and libraries which made maintaining it painstaking.

In fact, I think you worked on it too.

[jghn]

I still find the "frameworks and libraries" argument to be false, but enough people say it that I believe it must be at least partially true. I'll settle for a belief that the argument is overstated.

IMO the largest issue is the breadth of one's experience, or lack thereof. And by that I don't mean simply the number of languages but how well versed one is in different languages and their surrounding ecosystems. For instance having good knowledge of both C# and Java isn't what I'm describing here.

[SimonPStevens]

I think it's about how much newness you have to handle at the same time. I can happily take a project using a framework or two I've never touched before. Or something in a new language but similar domain. But when you have the perfect storm of new language, tools and framework (and maybe OS) that's when it hurts. I'm not saying I totally couldn't switch, but it made me change me attitude a bit from '2 weeks and I'll be back at full productivity' to something more like '2 to the power of number of new things'. The more newness that has to be handled at the same time, the longer it takes to pick up all the interconnections.

[jghn]

This is also true, I would say it's a combo of the two. The more new things at once the more likely it is that you'll be working with something without a good correlation to something in your previous experience. But at the same time having a broader and richer base of experience will make it more likely that you'll have an easier go of it for any of those individual things.

[SimonPStevens]

> In fact, I think you worked on it too.

Oh dear, what code of mine have you seen? :-) (email address is in my profile if it's not something publicly discussable)

[imdsm]

Let's just say we've both worked for a particular online retailer who thought having the mobile site act like an app but not be an app would be a good idea.

[jcadam]

> I happily picked up the actual language very quickly. It was the surrounding ecosystem of compilers, build tools, debugging tools, libraries, standard patterns and best practises that was too deep for me to become proficient in.

I felt the same way trying to learn Haskell. The language itself isn't that hard to learn, but just try and go read some code for one of the large open source hs code bases (like Yesod, etc.) :)

I also remember being put on a C++ project after being away from the language for years (C++ 11 was... different from the C++ I used back in the early 2000s). I was completely lost for a while :O

On the other hand, some languages are easy to pick up quickly (like Go), and some just 'click' for some people (as Clojure did for me).

[tjl]

The C++ template system alone makes it very difficult. Plus, many people have a habit of writing a mess of interconnected classes that become very difficult to pull apart to understand what's happening.

During my Master's (and my Ph.D.) I was using a finite element approach developed by a former Ph.D. of my supervisor(s). So, I asked for the code. I got back a mess of C++ and it was dependent on a linear algebra C++ library that wasn't around in the same form. I spent some time trying to reason out what he was trying to do, gave up and wrote my own in Fortran in about as much time as I spent trying to understand his.

[eru]

> I happily picked up the actual language very quickly. It was the surrounding ecosystem of compilers, build tools, debugging tools, libraries, standard patterns and best practises that was too deep for me to become proficient in.

Yes, those take a while. It's even harder if the new language is outside of paradigms you are familiar with. Eg Prolog or Haskell would be that for most people.

[Const-me]

Migrating between platforms can be painful.

I’ve started coded C++/CX without noticeable degradation in productivity.

But when I need to code for e.g. linux, because of those tools and practices you’ve mentioned my productivity was much worse compared to using Visual Studio on Windows, even when using same standard C++.