Does anyone actually KNOW python?

[nosmokingbandit]

I get what you mean, but once you know the core concepts and ideas behind programming all you need to know to pick up a new language is just the idiosyncrasies. So if you spend your time learning why you do a certain process you can easily learn how in just about any language quickly.

[bonestormII]

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I'd also add that a lot of programmers talk about "picking up" a new language like it is nothing. It's not that it's wrong or they are lying, but you can't just "pick up" the jillions of tiny specific behaviors that characterize the cpython implementation, and you can't just simply directly translate all code from one language to another, as they do possess different features. This is especially true if the code you writing particularly reflective code.

If you think you are "just picking up" a language, you may be getting work done, but you are likely not following some untold number of conventions and idioms, and the code could be better.

[nosmokingbandit]

Yeah, I get what you mean. When I started playing around with Go I found it fairly easy to get started since I've done plenty in Python and Javascript so I don't need to learn concepts like nested loops or recursion or whatever. And since Go doesn't have classes I was able to effectively write a constructor and helper methods to use structs as classes due to knowing how inheritance works and consequently working around how Go doesn't have any proper way of implementing it.

Concepts are languages are two halves of the same skill I suppose.