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Discussion on: How many programming languages do you know?

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Tim Downey

I used to think I could "know" a programming language in a week or two.

I still can program in one in that amount of time and lean on a linter/style checker to achieve some semblance of idiomatic code.

For this definition I'd say I "know":

  • C
  • Scheme
  • Javascript
  • Java
  • Go
  • Ruby
  • Python

I've built projects in all of those languages and with the help of the internet I can become productive in them again.

However to truly "know" a language now and be able to do deep debugging of issues I feel like I need to understand more of the nitty gritty of it. How does it implement threads? What is its memory management/garbage collection like? Etc. etc.

In addition to this I like to ask myself "would a seasoned $LANGUAGE programmer understand this code?" "Would they be surprised by anything?"

For that definition of "know" I mostly just know Ruby. 😱