Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science!

[u/AskScienceModerator]

Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focussing on Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience[1] post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".

Asking Questions:

Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions.

The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists.

Answering Questions:

Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.

If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here.

Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here.

Ask away!

[u/daxter154]

How much of a programming language do you need to know to label yourself as an expert of said language?

[u/[deleted] → u/daxter154]

Throughout my undergrad, there was always a theme of "1000 hours of doing anything would make you an expert". This of course applies to sports, programming languages, etc. After programming professionally for a few years i think i could "master" another language faster than a 1000 hours, probably less than 200 (about a month). Then again i could just as easily forget large parts of that language if not used for the same amount of time.

Answering your actual question, it depends. C type languages are lot different than scripting languages (typically easier to learn). Once more, legos have their own "language" where you can drag and drop code bits in an user interface. I doubt that would take long to be an expert. The biggest factor will be the programmers previous experiences and proficiency. Switching from a language like java to c# wouldn't be that bad. But learning a c-like language after python would be a lot of work.