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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

It's one thing knowing the language, it's another being productive with the ecosystem.

One takes between a few days and a few months. The other is a few years, unless you get pro training.

I guarantee most people starting with Python from another language will be productive quickly. But they will curse the packaging ecosystem because they will follow a lot of tutorials that don't follow this:

https://bitecode.substack.com/p/why-not-tell-people-to-simpl...

And they'll get screwed.

They will have a hard time learning this:

https://www.bitecode.dev/p/relieving-your-python-packaging-p...

It will take a long time of trials and errors, suffering all the way.

And this is true for many other aspects: good editor config, good web deployment story, good app sharing system, good tooling setup, etc

A runtime or a stlib is quite small and stable. But an ecosystem is gigantic and moving.

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Yeah I learned Ruby on Rails very quickly a long time ago, it's probably one of the most accessible frameworks to learn, but it took me years to master all the weird quirks, dev environment stuff, debugging, production deployment etc. Plus from all the years doing it I'm familiar with all the old libraries so when you join a company with a large legacy code base, which at this point is very common for rails, I don't have to spend forever learning the details of some 7yr old implentation no one uses anymore.

Working with senior devs who have only been doing it for 1-2yrs is where you see the small productivity differences that aren't simply being a newbie programmer.

You're seriously arguing that someone with general knowledge of programming is going to get hard-stuck not knowing specifics of a language you and thousands of others have blogposted about for years, while linking your own posts?

Let's be real here. What percentage of companies are in dire need of 'experienced [language] programmers' who know these specifics that haven't already been set by previous devs or have another developer present to make the decisions? That's a tiny, tiny percentage of the entire job market, with much of the demand coming from companies with incredibly shaky foundations.

Almost the entirety of this is a luxury problem put on the individual. The moment the job market says they can't demand it anymore, they won't.

Yes.

Last week I talked with a guy who was pitching to rewrite their entire product in another language because he never heard of python GIS ecoshst and was doing spatial calculations by hand. Would cost hundred of thousand euros.

The HN bubble strikes again.

I don’t agree at all. I was productive within a month in a completely new language and stack at my current job for example. Once you know a few inside out, it’s just pattern matching with some Googling of “what’s X in Y language”.

Extremely deep knowledge of a language is very rarely needed, even when it is as long as you can somewhat vocalize the problem it’s just debugging

Indeed, I talk about lots of stuff, as an old dev that has been through lot of stuff.

However if I need to do quiz, or coding exercise, closed book style, only Java and C#, to a lesser extent C++, would be a viable option for me.

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