> I would further argue that you simply cannot (usefully) see the global commonalities and idioms among languages until you've been doing this for a while. Years.
That's assuming you are not shown the commonalities explicitly, and have to figure them out by yourself. A course on programming languages teaches just that, and it takes only a semester (possibly a brutal one, but still).
> I've not known any "experts" at 20 languages, ever.
Lucky you. I've never met any expert, period.
Anyway, expertise in a language is not interesting. You want to be an expert at programming. Then translating your thoughts in any language is easy —including languages you don't know.
My "expert at 20 languages" isn't really an expert in those languages. She's an expert at programming, and proficient in 20 languages. Personally, that's what I strive for. I'll leave language lawyering to the compiler writers. (I may write a compiler someday, but it will be for a simple language of my own design. I have no interest in cancerous horrors such as C++ —which by the way is the language I happen to know best.)
That's assuming you are not shown the commonalities explicitly, and have to figure them out by yourself. A course on programming languages teaches just that, and it takes only a semester (possibly a brutal one, but still).
> I've not known any "experts" at 20 languages, ever.
Lucky you. I've never met any expert, period.
Anyway, expertise in a language is not interesting. You want to be an expert at programming. Then translating your thoughts in any language is easy —including languages you don't know.
My "expert at 20 languages" isn't really an expert in those languages. She's an expert at programming, and proficient in 20 languages. Personally, that's what I strive for. I'll leave language lawyering to the compiler writers. (I may write a compiler someday, but it will be for a simple language of my own design. I have no interest in cancerous horrors such as C++ —which by the way is the language I happen to know best.)