Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

>> How long does it take for an experienced programmer to learn

I'd guess about 2 weeks but I'd be interested to hear other people's take on this. I'd break that down as:

1. The syntax: an hour

2. The rules of the language & the grammar: Under 2 days

3. Ability to write all the idiomatic constructs from muscle memory: Under a week. Timebox yourself to 1.5 days reading the compiler, std library, popular big projects in the language and dedicate the rest of the time to writing

4. The landscape: the common tools, popular and essential libraries, some tidbits of latest news in the community: Under 3 days

You're clearly NOT going to be an expert in the language after 2 weeks but you're going to be productive as an already experienced developer.

There is absolutely no way that you will be as productive as an already experienced developer in two weeks with the Erlang/BEAM/OTP/Elixir stack. It's a completely different world compared to what you are used to, and that's probably a good thing but the time to adapt and become really comfortable is going to be at a minimum closer to a year than a couple of days to weeks.

People who are already familiar with the actor model, soft real time systems, supervision trees and possibly PROLOG would likely move faster.

Why PROLOG?

Erlang has a bit of Prolog heritage. You can see it in the Variable-constant and predicate/n syntax, pattern matching, multiple clauses, immutability etc... Do not know eilxir so can not say how much it affects that.

Yeah agreed - my wording is off at the end of my post. A comma makes it slightly better but it’s still not clear:

>> You're clearly NOT going to be an expert in the language after 2 weeks but you're going to be productive, as [you are] an already experienced developer.

Thanks for the clarification. Commas and quotes, the bane of my existence, glad to see I'm not alone :)

2 weeks? It takes 2 years to learn a new platform/language.

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