[lnanek2]

It's common to put people who are already employed through these things when their skills are out of date. You'd much prefer a JS developer than a Fortran or Pascal developer today, right? But many huge corporations have only the later.

[fra]

Actually I'd take a good Fortran or Pascal developer any day. What programming language they know isn't relevant. If they're a good engineer they'll figure out javascript or whatever the flavor of the month is.

[rmason]

There's a Detroit employer running a bootcamp to take Cobol developers and retain them for IOS. I hear its been a big success.

Why wouldn't someone with 30-40 years of programming experience and who is motivated not be able to learn a new language?

[mrottenkolber]

My take on this: Someone with 30 years of experience does not need a "boot camp" to learn a new language. Actually I find it quite fascinating that these programs exist and seem to be successful.

If someone told me to train a productive programmer from scratch in 12 weeks time I would tell them that this is impossible. It took me five years of professional experience and a ton (really LOTS) of spare-time hacking to feel reasonably fireproof in my profession. Maybe I'm not the smartest guy and it it took me longer but I honestly doubt its doable in 12 weeks.

There is just too many concepts you need to learn. 12 weeks would give you someone who can edit JavaScript code without really knowing what he's doing and how his tool (JS) works imho. He might be able to wire up a dynamic website with some GUI callbacks but I doubt he could actually design a program.

From a proficient programmer, I'd expect that you can give him any programming language and that he can use it after a weekend or two. I'd also expect him to be able to read the language implementations source code. What good are you if you can't debug your tools?

[vonmoltke]

> Someone with 30 years of experience does not need a "boot camp" to learn a new language.

No, but they could very likely need a "boot camp" to get their resume past braindead gatekeepers or to make contacts that allow them to bypass said gatekeepers.