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Discussion on: When can you say you know a language?

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Luke Bearl

I think the thing that throws people is the difference between the language and the frameworks and standard patterns and practices that are used in the language. I would expect most people can learn the syntax of a new language in a few days (obviously that might change depending on the language).

My personal "main" language is C#. I expect anyone with a background in C-style languages could probably figure out any normal C# code with just a little bit of time. Figuring out the innards of how to use C# to make a WPF app or an ASP.NET Core Web application suddenly requires significantly more research and time. I'm using .NET examples here, but you can replace C# with Java and WPF and ASP.NET with Swing and Tomcat pretty easily.