How would one decide on having mastered a programming language? http://norvig.co...

jacquesm · on Oct 9, 2009

Let's say if you dared to take on a short time high pay job with your reputation at stake on delivering ?

yannis · on Oct 9, 2009

Or rule of thumb, you can write a significant amount of code in the language:

(a) without reference to the web or your reference books.

(b) with a minimum amount of syntax errors

jacquesm · on Oct 9, 2009

> without reference to the web or your reference books.

That's one of my main gripes with Java. Without an IDE you are essentially blind. The language itself is reasonably easy, but before you really grok those libraries takes forever.

And I really do not like IDEs, but when working in Java I almost have to.

The library and API's are just enormous.

yannis · on Oct 9, 2009

They are and I agree it takes forever .. but that is mastering, maybe not 10 years but +- 10 000 lines of code before you master it.

Java is not a beautiful language! I find the language libraries quite verbose and difficult to memorize. Brevity is a virtue. If one is to master a language the first thing you should do (I know it might sound heretical!) is to start a small collection of wrappers and generic routines with shorter names that are easier to memorize.

A good example of such a 'wrapper', but from JavaScript is jQuery, which to a great extend is a wrapper around the DOM. At the expense of the code John Resig managed to minimize the API.

      $().css()

      not document.getElementById() etc...

It does take time though!