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by avargas 4729 days ago
I can't seem to understand if people really do think they can learn a language in X minutes. It takes countless hours of writing code in a specific language to learn it, and many months of writing on it to call yourself a good programmer in that language, or expert. </rant>
7 comments

It's getting tiresome to always see this same comment on every post of this kind. Let's keep the semantics arguments off HN.
I just learned it! and it was damn easy! brb, fixing my resume.
It's more of a "kickstart your Java knowledge" I guess.

Sam can't teach you to become an expert in 24 hours, but you can get a better knowledge if you come from another language / have seen Java before.

I think these articles are a decent cheat sheet beginners can reference when writing their first few programs. Annotated example code is extremely useful.
Of course it would be very short-sighted to assume you could gain expert knowledge of a programming language in X minutes. However, these cheat sheets are a great way to get started in an unfamiliar environment, given that you know your basics.
You can learn to yo-yo in 5 minutes. You can also learn for years. There are different demands for different amounts of mastery. This one is just particularly low. (knowing the general ideas behind java is better than none)
I always just replace it with "Learn enough X to read a codebase in Y Minutes"