[pfisch]

I'm not even talking about the little languages that just come in and out of fashion all the time.

If you know c++ you could basically roll right into C#, Java, PHP, etc in under a week and be doing real work in them. Maybe you wouldn't have the intricacies down immediately but you could be doing production code level work very quickly.

[bandushrew]

You could, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Learning a new language, say C++ -> Java is WAY more than just learning the syntax. There are best practices for solving certain kinds of problems in each language that differ between language.

Sure, there is a high level similarity between the solutions (hey, its just the observer pattern, right?), but there are also likely (IME) to be many critical differences in the details.

[EliRivers]

You could probably write C++ code in C#, Java and PHP, but it would be hideous. I've seen Fortran written in C, and Pascal written in C++, and C written in Java, and it's generally an unholy mess.

[ics]

That may be true for many languages, but if those people never roll into that sort of situation it's probably fair to still call them programmers.