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How does a short learning curve necessarily correlate to a "nearly empty" toolbox? That seems like a fallacy to me.

Ruby is fairly easy to learn. Does that mean it has a nearly empty toolbox? No it doesn't.

A language with a GC is easier to learn than one without a GC. Does the one with a GC have less in the toolbox? What if it also allows opting out of GC?

ObjC is considered a hard language to learn, esp for people used to C++ and Java. Does this come from it having more tools in the toolbox?

"A language with a short learning curve is like a toolbox that’s nearly empty" is a nice quote, but it also objectively seems to be wrong.

1 comments

> Ruby is fairly easy to learn

No, its not. Ruby as a language is about as complex as they come.

It is easy to get to a productive state though, but that is not the same thing as having learned the language. Length of learning curve and accessibility are vastly different things.

Getting productive easily is the pretty much the definition of not having a steep learning curve. So I have difficulties making sense of your argument.

yxhuvud referred to length of the learning curve, not slope of the learning curve.

Even if getting started is easy (no steep slope), mastery can take long.

Python is the same. It's easy to write simple code, but once you get deep enough, the skeletons come out of closet.