Did you miss the part "to a level where you can start contributing to a project with it?" In OPs question?
I think you are the one being incredibly uncharitable. Here is the question:
"how long do you find it takes you to learn"
This is his answer for how long it takes him to feel he has adequate mastery. Perhaps he should have refrained from using the word "you" a few times, but it is not common in English to say "one," so you is often used to mean "people generally" rather than "You in specific, the person I am currently addressing."
It often causes problems in online communication and I have had my head handed to me over using the generic you on quite a few occasions, which is an incredibly uncharitable reading that usually gives me the impression the person was basically looking for an excuse to attack me personally for some reason. (This was years ago on a list where that kind of nonsense was quite common. I don't specifically recall it happening to me on HN, in part because I have worked at avoiding the generic you in any instance where someone might use it as an excuse to rake me over the coals).
You can spend the rest of the day wondering (privately, to yourself) if he is merely neurotic or if he has some kind of learning disability or if he has wisdom of experience that perhaps others should learn from (or all of the above -- none of them precludes the others). But that's completely different from assuming his answer is being given in bad faith.
There are other answers here that say some variation of the same thing -- that real mastery takes quite a long time. I don't see any reason why this answer should be singled out for being criticized in this way -- other than the fact that jacquesm is very high on the leaderboard and this position makes him a target of gratuitous nonsense of this sort.
I think you are the one being incredibly uncharitable. Here is the question:
"how long do you find it takes you to learn"
This is his answer for how long it takes him to feel he has adequate mastery. Perhaps he should have refrained from using the word "you" a few times, but it is not common in English to say "one," so you is often used to mean "people generally" rather than "You in specific, the person I am currently addressing."
It often causes problems in online communication and I have had my head handed to me over using the generic you on quite a few occasions, which is an incredibly uncharitable reading that usually gives me the impression the person was basically looking for an excuse to attack me personally for some reason. (This was years ago on a list where that kind of nonsense was quite common. I don't specifically recall it happening to me on HN, in part because I have worked at avoiding the generic you in any instance where someone might use it as an excuse to rake me over the coals).
You can spend the rest of the day wondering (privately, to yourself) if he is merely neurotic or if he has some kind of learning disability or if he has wisdom of experience that perhaps others should learn from (or all of the above -- none of them precludes the others). But that's completely different from assuming his answer is being given in bad faith.
There are other answers here that say some variation of the same thing -- that real mastery takes quite a long time. I don't see any reason why this answer should be singled out for being criticized in this way -- other than the fact that jacquesm is very high on the leaderboard and this position makes him a target of gratuitous nonsense of this sort.