> I find that I often have a 2 week ramp up for any given programming language.
I agree that a competent, experienced developer can do this. What's worth noting, however, is that it takes two weeks to cross the bar of "can contribute code in this language that produces deliverable results". But two weeks cannot get you across the bar of "can contribute robust, maintainable code in this language".
Even though you are not a beginner to programming, you are a beginner to the language and its ecosystem and so will still make some significant newbie mistakes. Ruby on Rails is a good example of this: half of being good at RoR is being a good programmer, the other half is memorized knowledge of the idioms and patterns of the framework and community.
> But two weeks cannot get you across the bar of "can contribute robust, maintainable code in this language".
Unfortunately, this is so true and yet so difficult for people to realize and understand.
I've seen in real life wherein somebody hired at a supreme decision-making authority comes in and says "We'll rewrite everything in language X". Existing folks in the team quickly start ramping up on the language and simultaneously writing production code. Much of the code thus written tends to be pathological.
> But two weeks cannot get you across the bar of "can contribute robust, maintainable code in this language"
So do 10 years of experience. "robust, maintainable code" is just coding convention that a group of developers comes up with. The convention can vary from one team to another.
I went from Perl to Python / Django. I could write stuff straight away as the languages don't differ too much, but took me 6 months to write decent Django code, and longer to produce efficient, nice django-esque code using best practices.
I agree that a competent, experienced developer can do this. What's worth noting, however, is that it takes two weeks to cross the bar of "can contribute code in this language that produces deliverable results". But two weeks cannot get you across the bar of "can contribute robust, maintainable code in this language".
Even though you are not a beginner to programming, you are a beginner to the language and its ecosystem and so will still make some significant newbie mistakes. Ruby on Rails is a good example of this: half of being good at RoR is being a good programmer, the other half is memorized knowledge of the idioms and patterns of the framework and community.