Estimate: How long to learn .net/javascript efficiently [closed]

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We have a slightly over optimistic boss, so I would like to hear it from other people.

Someone who has about 3 years of good PHP, HTML, and CSS knowledge. However this person has never really worked with any other type of object oriented language like c++, java, python or c#. He is just now discovering things like LESS, media queries/responsive design, minification & bundling, and has no real JavaScript knowledge, and very little of jQuery.

Now how long would you guys estimate it would take (just a ballpark estimate, knowing he is motivated and smart) to be able to make/manage a site in asp.net MVC that has the complexity of a site lets say a mix of Mashable and Twitter and that makes heavy use of cache management, Ajax web services, responsive design, authentication, linq, anonymous functions, delegates, async/tpl, database access, jQuery, and object oriented JavaScript ?

The how long question is more: how long do you estimate till he's is able to make or manage a site like above, but the site must also be of high quality, and able to take on millions of monthly users.

Thanks all !

Please only serious feedback. Even if you guys could break down the learning curves for the different technologies that would be great. I'd like my boss to get a serious and non biased idea of how long these types of things can take to learn.

Answer 1

a LONG time. Object oriented is a little bit of a different beast than simple scripting. Of course everyone learns at different rates, but i'd say it'd be something on the magnitude of several years.

Answer 2

Changing platforms is a real tough job. Most people try to find exact same techniques they know in PHP to do it in ASP.NET MVC, which is never possible. And all these people do not start as fresh, they skip things as considered as they know it. This leads to half knowledge and then just searching on google on how to do similar thing on different technology.

We did migrate from Java to ASP.NET MVC and we could do it in reasonable period of 1 year. First 3 months were put in learning code samples from MSDN. Next set of 3 months were spent on writing code for our app straight with the knowledge we had. But it does end up in writing code very inefficently that needs refractoring. After that we did refractor code for 6 months!!

ASP.NET MVC is centered more towards Entity Framework and Linq, and that is the tough part, if you can master Entity Framework the way it is supposed to be done, than rest is very easy. Digesting navigation properties and writing queries using navigation property instead of JOINS is the hardest part.

ASP.NET MVC with EF means, NO SQL, NO JOINS. I always loved ORMLs so I learned quickly, but it is little confusing, you must focus more on Entity Framework.

Rest of ASP.NET MVC is pretty much similar to that of any php MVC framework.

Answer 3

C# would be a bit easier to learn. C++ would be the slightly better choice if you need maximum performance. I would not recommend java, but that is my personal taste.

Changing a language is mostly changing the syntax, which might be learned in quite a short timeframe. BUT CHANGING THE PARADIGM forces you to think in new patterns, which is a lot harder to do.

Nevertheless we are talking about AT LEAST 2 years, if he is learning fast. After that, he might start working on the actual site, which will take also at least more than 6 months. If the design is already made by someone, who knows what he ios doing. Otherwise the time may range from additional 6 month (because he needs to start from scratch at some point) and eternity.

I would not want to be the guy, maintaining the site, if he learns the language by working on the site. And you would not want to be the one to use it.