>Programming is a discipline that is independant of the language that is used. A good programmer will be good in any language they use and a poor programmer will be poor regardless of the language.
>
>Learning a second, third, or fourth langauge is not a prohibitive endeavor. I would venture to say that most of the high quality programmers in the world use more than one language. A good carpenter needs more than a hammer and a good programmer needs more than one langauge.

Jim,

I agree with your basic principle here. But I'd still point out that you can be a really good programmer (I hope I am) but still have a lot to learn about expedient ways to accomplish a task in a particular language.

In college I got really good at VAX Pascal, since almost every class I took required programming in that language. In my senior year I took a C class because I heard it was the big up-and-coming thing (God am I dating myself). In the C class, I wrote code which compiled in C but looked an awful lot like Pascal. Some of the things I did were not done in the most efficient way for C.

I've now been a (V)FP programmer for about 8 years. I think I'm pretty well educated about several aspects of how Fox works, I have real indepth knowledge about some very large areas, including lots of tips, tricks, and traps which commands and constructs allow me to get certain things done much faster, and make them much more efficient and robust, than someone who is just starting to learn VFP, even if they're as good (or a better) programmer than myself. Of course as complex as VFP is, there are some areas (client server, internet, some OOP aspects) which I've still just dabbled in myself.

On the other hand, even if other objective observers are willing to acknowledge my claim that I'm a darn good programmer, and a FoxPro expert, the fact that I've just taken a community college Intro to VB course (as I have) doesn't prepare me to quickly develop great enterprise VB/SQL C/S solutions...

Am I making any sense?

Cheers,
Rich.