Stats on how long people take to learn a new programming language?

Question

In general aspects, this might be a good reference for everyone. Having an idea of how long people take in average for properly learning how to code can give a very good idea on how dense or long is the path.

Someone who never programmed should take weeks or months, even years maybe while someone who's already experienced in the area and know at least 2 different languages might take days, hours or even minutes to start coding.

But other than being able to write code that runs, there are ways to write the same program, and it's much harder to get deep knowledge on that than actually being able to program. And sometimes languages differ a lot from one to another on that aspect as well. For instance, we should never have to worry with code-injection in JavaScript like we do in C.

So, is there any place we can see some good numbers for how long it takes to learn a language, maybe divided into level of knowledge categories, languages and paradigms, etc?

edit: This is not meant to be subjective, I just gave my clueless data examples because I have got no good idea on the subject.

I want data points and statistics on this. It is not to be perfect, it's to serve as reference.

For instance, a good reference would be course times and effectiveness of people formed in those. But then, again, from several different schools. That's not the only way to do the stats, tho.

Answer 1

Also See:

• How long does it take an experienced programmer to become proficient with a new technology / language?
• Knowing C++, how long does it take to learn Java?
• How Long Does it Take to Learn Java for a Complete Newbie?
• How long would it take me to learn Objective C programming having no prior programming experience?
• How long does it take to learn objective c/iPhone sdk coming from an object oriented PHP background?

Related:

• Learn a new language every year
• Learning two languages in a year i.e. c# and javascript good idea?

Answer 2

Ten Years. (Someone was going to post that link anyway ...)

Answer 3

I think the speed with which one picks up new programming languages is highly dependent on the individual. It also depends on how similar the new language is to the ones previously learned (for example, going from C++ to Java may be much easier than say from C++ to Ruby or to Haskell). Also, I think your statement about JavaScript is incorrect; for example, in JavaScript, you have eval() and other security pitfalls.

Answer 4

In my experience the real time consuming thing about learning a new language is the APIs that go with it, fundamentally most languages are similar and therefore if you know others it's easy to adapt to the (usually) minor syntax differences.

Answer 5

Learning a language is one thing, learning frameworks is something else entirely. If you have some kind of OO background, you can probably pick up a new OO language and learn the syntax in a few nights. If you're from a procedural background then you need to learn OO principles as well.

C# is just a list of about 100 keywords and some operators, when you break it down. The .NET Framework could take a lifetime to learn every detail of, and then there's a plethora of third-party (open-source and otherwise) frameworks that can make your life incredibly easy or incredibly difficult, depending how you use them.

If you learn Ruby, you're probably thinking Ruby on Rails, but Rails is just a DSL for web development and there are others available and worth looking at - some that will take you a couple of days to pick up but will do the job; some that will take you ages to find all the features of.

So, in short, I guess I'm saying that this is one of those unanswerable questions.

Answer 6

Obviously each person will be different, but I'm capable of getting started and doing some basic tasks (Hello World, Fizz Buzz, etc.) in a new language in about the time it takes to read a decent tutorial -- so usually a few hours. But doing anything more complex than that depends on learning the API, and the time it takes for that depends in large part on the complexity of the API and the quality of the documentation for it.

Answer 7

It depends partly on the ideas behind the language. If you know C, you can write bad C++ programs almost immediately. Learning how to use the OO and template features well will take a lot longer, not because of awkward syntax (although C++ certainly has that), but because you have to learn new ways to think.