• conciselyverbose
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    fedilink
    51 year ago

    The 10k hours claim you make further down (popularized by Gladwell) is also an absurd overreach on what the research actually was or claimed to be. Read Peak by K Anders Ericsson instead of Gladwell’s outliers and you get a very different presentation of what the research says from one of the researchers.

    They were studying a very specific type of rote learning with a specific type of training (because being classically trained in violin is that standardized). The number of hours trained to reach expert status was not identical between practitioners. He made absolutely zero claims about the amount of time needed to learn different skills that fit the same pattern, and more importantly, really didn’t make such claims about entirely different and unrelated types of learning like code that aren’t formalized.

    Gladwell’s book was straight anecdote with no rigor. Ignoring that, languages aren’t that different and an expert can very easily hop most languages with minimal impact.