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Comment by laichzeit0 | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, learning a new language is a joke. It doesn't require a substantial investment of time.

You're most likely going to be gluing API calls together and that's where you'll spend 80% of your time: Learning APIs. Even then this is more likely looking things up in documentation or googling for answers on StackOverflow. Whether you glue them with Python, Ruby, Objective-C, Java, Swift, etc. it really doesn't matter.

If a new programming language is your only gripe then you have a way bigger problem on your hands when it comes to writing applications :)

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> To be fair, learning a new language is a joke. It doesn't require a substantial investment of time.

I suspect Peter Norvig would disagree with you there -- http://norvig.com/21-days.html

> You're most likely going to be gluing API calls together and that's where you'll spend 80% of your time

For certain problems this is the case, and you can get away with writing Python/Ruby/etc in Swift syntax.

For other problems it isn't the case. Choice of language does matter; if it didn't, would Apple have invented Swift in the first place?

Learning to program is not the same as learning a new language. Norvig is talking about something utterly different that has no relevance here. It's even hinted at in his own words -- "Learn at least a half dozen programming languages.".

> Learning to program is not the same as learning a new language. Norvig is talking about something utterly different that has no relevance here.

At least in parts of his essay, Norvig is talking about learning a new language when one already knows how to program. For example, where he says:

In 3 days you might be able to learn some of the syntax of C++ (if you already know another language), but you couldn't learn much about how to use the language. In short, if you were, say, a Basic programmer, you could learn to write programs in the style of Basic using C++ syntax, but you couldn't learn what C++ is actually good (and bad) for.

> To be fair, learning a new language is a joke. It doesn't require a substantial investment of time.

I think that rather depends on the language and your past experience. Most programmers with experience in mainstream languages will indeed require a substantial investment of time to learn a radically different language like Haskell.

>radically different

But swift isn't radically different paradigm shift like switching to a purely functional language like Haskell from a life spent writting c++.

I think your confusing learning functional programming with learning a "functional programming language." The "functional" part takes longer then the "programming lanague" part.

I didn't say anything about Swift: rather, I was responding to the parent's overly general assertion.

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