[cmrdporcupine]

I mean, the issue is not learning the language. It's the best practices, the standard libraries, the language idioms, etc. A week is a tad unreasonable.

A week to learn syntax? Sure. But to really be a fully operational battle-station engineer in a new language stack is probably 6 months to a year.

I would however expect people to be able to submit code reviews for e.g. bug fixes and small features after two to three weeks.

[rixed]

No really, that's a small ecosystem, we are not talking about Java or JS or python. Also, you should not need to know all the ropes of an ecosystem to work in one given environment.

If you are reasonably experienced with computers, learning the syntax will take you 2h. Again, that's Ocaml we are talking about. ML syntax has been designed to teach programming to fresh students with just a background in math.

If you already know C and Unix, you will be good to go in one afternoon... unless you want to use dune or compile to JS or use the repl etc.

[cmrdporcupine]

I taught myself both StandardML and OCaml 20+ years ago as hobby. But I'd never advertise myself as an OCaml programmer. Yes, the syntax is relatively easy to learn. But when I look at what Jane St etc have created for libs, the tooling, etc.

C'mon, there's more there than 2 weeks.

[rixed]

Ok but the amount of education that is needed to join Jane St is certainly very large, but acquiring the language itself is probably a very tiny amount of that. That's exactly why I'm disagreeing: there is much more to know and to learn than the syntax and semantic of a programming language to do a good job, that's why when I consider hiring I'm not insisting too much about previous familiarity with a given language; that's the easy part.

[cmrdporcupine]

yeah i think we broadly agree. Language syntax is the frankly lowest hurdle. Or should be. Knowledge of ecosystem and best practices and engineering wisdom is much more important.