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Comment by aliz | Hacker News Reader

Well, I didn't know there was a standard... for me it just felt "I know more Javascript than Haskell etc" so I put one more black square. So maybe I should change it to 2 out of 7 or whatever. :/

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Aliz, I guess I was responding to the OP comment about resume's more than anything and didn't mean to offend. I really like your use of a scale, and your project is very impressive!

Don't let pedantic nerds get you down. It's fine. Full disclosure: I too am a pedantic nerd.

Wasn't trying to be pedantic, just giving feedback. In fact I totally respect the relativity of the scale, I would just say if it was for a job interview you'd want to maybe do as you said and adjust on a larger scale.

My point was 2 months in JS != 40% knowledge of JS. If that came across as pedantic, I apologize.

It might be a weighted 40%. As in, she knows 40% of what she needs to know or will encounter in real-world JS... or she's 40% as productive as she'd be with maximal fluency. There's probably a Zipf's Law over programming idioms where you can pick up the first half in a few months, the next quarter takes a year or so, and the last quarter takes more than a decade to encounter, comprehend, and be able to use masterfully.

Using a frequency-weighted metric, I would say that I'm 70-95% fluent (unknown unknowns make it hard to get confidence in a number) in my best languages, but I'm not an expert in any of them (and I'd only rate myself 3-3.5 on a 5-point scale, because percentage fluency on first-order concepts isn't the only important thing). I don't think it's hard to get to that point. Getting those last few percentage points is much harder.

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