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by coldtea 3356 days ago
>So as far as actually talking about my point goes, what exactly am I missing? There are small differences but I've never seen a language that I couldn't get up and going in over the course of a week.

That's because you either used the languages superficially, or use only very similar languages, probably of the Algol family (e.g. Ruby, Python, PHP, JS, etc).

You won't get very far with Haskell "over the course of a week". Or APL. Or Idris. Or Erlang. Or Lisp -- or any other language that's not a mere Algol derivative with some different bells and whistles. And even those have their idioms, of course, that one needs much more than a week to get competent with, but, it gets worse when we expand languages to not be "mainstream Algol derivatives". One would only be using languages like Smalltalk, OcamL, Scheme, Scala, Self, etc, superficially without getting into their idioms and nuance, which wont happen in a week (and can take years to really master).

1 comments

Well of course you can't include languages like Haskell in the group of interchangeable languages. Incidentally I have used Haskell (and it did take more than a week). But it doesn't matter because we're talking about moving JavaScript developers to Java, or C++, or as you say, Algol-likes.
>Well of course you can't include languages like Haskell in the group of interchangeable languages.

Well, if you can only include "interchangeable languages" then it's not an observation but a tautology.

No kidding? What I was trying to say (I thought I was pretty clear) is that we're really only considering institutional languages here. As it turns out to my knowledge theyre basically all the same.