When do you "know" a language?

[Insectoid]

I don't know if anyone's said this yet, because there are so many long posts I don't feel like reading, but,

I believe that once you have learned how to use a majority of that language's commonly used syntaxand a portion of the less commonly used syntax, and help people more than you ask for it, then you 'know' that language. That doesn't mean you know how to program though.

Programming involves considerable knowledge of the logic of the language. Knowing one language will help little when trying to learn a new one; knowing how to program will help a lot.

Aziz, you do sound smart!

[Epic Tissue]

I guess you know a language when you understand it

[Dragan]

Prabhakar Ragde @ Mon Jun 09, 2008 7:07 pm wrote:

wtd @ Sun Jun 08, 2008 6:38 pm wrote:

When you dream code in that language.

Reminds me of an old joke, about the French teacher who told her students that they would "know" French when they dreamt in it. One student tried hard in class but was pretty bad at the language. But he came in one day all excited, saying, "Teacher, teacher, last night I finally had a dream in which everyone was talking French!" The teacher said, "Great! What was the dream about?" and the student said "Heck if I know, I couldn't understand a word they were saying!"

Tonight, I will dream in english.

[Aziz]

Epic, and when do you "understand" a language. Also, insectoid, I don't think syntax is so closely related to knowledge of a language. For example, Java's syntax is quite similar to C#'s, but to know one is not to know the other. It also requires knowledge of the language tools, and how to apply them.

[Tony]

More comments on reddit.

[btiffin]

Well done Tony, (and michealp for the original question), you've got quite the buzz going.

And I don't know jack.

Cheers

[michaelp]

Tehehe, I made a "buzz".
And for the memorizing thing, don't you "technically" still have to memorize some parts of the language that you are learning, even if it's just small part of it, like some sort of sneaky part of the language.

[btiffin]

Memorize is perhaps not quite the right word. Understanding more like. But, of course, going to the manual every time to remember the order of the three expressions in a C for statement is probably not going to get you past the probationary period of a C programmer position.

Cheers

[Aziz]

Not because you haven't memorized it, but rather because it shows you haven't used the language for longer than 3 hours total

[jeffgreco13]

Yeah, let's get one thing straight tho. I can't deal with people that think they 'know' a language because they've heard of it.

The only thing below a noob is a POSER!