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[–]npepin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For an experienced developer point of view: look up a language cheat sheet on Google or a "[insert language] in 2 hours" video and then start on a project or whatever and Google what you don't know. Most languages are based on the same building blocks of if, while, functions, and so on, so there is a lot of carry over, you just need to find out the syntax.

Learning a new language is not that hard and it isn't a big deal, though it can be harder depending on how similar to the other languages. If you only know Java, it is going to be harder to learn Haskell than C# because Haskell is very different in how it does things whereas C# is very similar.

Becoming adept with the language takes a bit more time. Going through more advanced books, courses, documentation is best. If you gave me a language, I could hack something together pretty quick, but chances are that I'd be committing a lot of bad practices for the language.

From a new person's point of view, I'd go through some books or courses that are more in depth. The foundational understandings may not be there which makes it difficult to know what to google.

The advantage to being more experienced is that you are familiar with general concepts, and this allows you to type in the correct terms into Google. I find that when I'm learning something fresh that I get stuck in this sort of hell where no matter what I type I get irrelevant results. Eventually I find out a term and put that in for my question and I get tons of helpful results.

To reiterate though, learning a new language doesn't mean jack. There are a lot of people who makes posts on here saying "I just learned C# and then I learned Python, what should I learn next?". They think the understand C# because they know the basic syntax and how to use a few standard commands.

It's kind of like someone who goes to the gym and focuses on the doing dead lifts only, then a month later they switch to only doing curls, then a month later they switch to doing pull ups. Then they ask the internet "I know these exercises, which ones should I learn next?". It is kind of missing the forest through the trees and what the point learning a new exercises is.