<story><title>What I&apos;d tell myself about startups if I could go back 5 years</title><url>http://www.talkingquickly.co.uk/2015/04/what-id-tell-myself-about-startups/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makeitsuckless</author><text>&amp;gt; A good developer can pick up any language or platform in a few weeks&lt;p&gt;Yes and no. There&amp;#x27;s a major difference between &amp;quot;picking up&amp;quot; and actually being good at something. If you have nobody on the team that is either already intimately familiar with the language&amp;#x2F;platform, or has experience with various languages&amp;#x2F;platforms, you&amp;#x27;re going to be spending a lot of time figuring out how to do stuff properly instead of just building stuff. And if you are a startup with a limited runway, that difference is crucial.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>emodendroket</author><text>The famous Norvig piece &amp;quot;Teach Yourself Programming In Ten Years&amp;quot; touches on this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  In 24 hours you might be able to learn some of the syntax of C++ (if you already know another language), but you couldn&amp;#x27;t learn much about how to use the language. In short, if you were, say, a Basic programmer, you could learn to write programs in the style of Basic using C++ syntax, but you couldn&amp;#x27;t learn what C++ is actually good (and bad) for. So what&amp;#x27;s the point? Alan Perlis once said: &amp;quot;A language that doesn&amp;#x27;t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing&amp;quot;. One possible point is that you have to learn a tiny bit of C++ (or more likely, something like JavaScript or Processing) because you need to interface with an existing tool to accomplish a specific task. But then you&amp;#x27;re not learning how to program; you&amp;#x27;re learning to accomplish that task.</text></comment>
<story><title>What I&apos;d tell myself about startups if I could go back 5 years</title><url>http://www.talkingquickly.co.uk/2015/04/what-id-tell-myself-about-startups/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makeitsuckless</author><text>&amp;gt; A good developer can pick up any language or platform in a few weeks&lt;p&gt;Yes and no. There&amp;#x27;s a major difference between &amp;quot;picking up&amp;quot; and actually being good at something. If you have nobody on the team that is either already intimately familiar with the language&amp;#x2F;platform, or has experience with various languages&amp;#x2F;platforms, you&amp;#x27;re going to be spending a lot of time figuring out how to do stuff properly instead of just building stuff. And if you are a startup with a limited runway, that difference is crucial.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Interesting, I read this as being open to hiring good developers even if they don&amp;#x27;t know your current platform&amp;#x2F;language. You can train that, and if you have existing expertise then you can pair them with someone who is experienced to teach them the nuances.</text></comment>