I’ve been using c# since .net 2 which came out around the turn of the century (lol)

I’d happily call myself an expert. I can do anything I need to and easily dive into the standard library source code or even IL when needed.

But even then there are topics I could easily learn more on particularly the very performance focused struct features and intrinsics.

I’ve found LLMs to be super useful when you have a very specific question about a feature. I use bing ai at work so it sources all its answers and you can dive into the articles for more detail.

Programming is a never ending learning journey and you just have to keep going. When you get something you don’t fully understand to a deep dive there are always resources for everything.

novice still learning everyday

I don’t think your question relates to the language as much as to the platform. The language of choice is somewhat irrelevant and what you care about is what actually happens under the hood.

For the likes of java and go you want to have some understanding of what runtime does for the memory allocations and how their GCs work. For python you sometimes end up in the spots where you need to understand what limitations the GIL imposes (even more important now that they are trying to get rid of it). When you run C (or C++ or Rust) on the embedded hardware it really helps to understand what exactly bit flipping does in specific registers and what DMA means for how you write your code.

You don’t really have to know it all. You can absolutely write code without caring about anything of that and I know plenty software engineers that do. Some people write amazing functional things in java without ever questioning what it does to the machines and what resources you need to run it.

If you start questioning it, that will only expand your understanding. It’s not a lateral move from e.g. C to Rust where you need to learn a lot to write your code in a memory-safe way, it’s a movement deeper into the stack and what you learn there will be applicable to any language you use for this stack.

Answering your question: I always feel bad about not understanding some low-level concept. I have stacks of MCU reference docs lying around, printed, highlighted; I have archives with sample code, and hand-annotated CMSIS reversing notes. Embedded world is hard because you can’t just know C and be done with it. You have to know the hardware, too.

Here’s my advice for you. Make notes of things that you learn from people smarter than you. Create a web of those notes and see where your gaps are. Then, work on learning something in those gaps in particular and see if you can make a blog post or something of your own. When you share what you learn you become one of those people with deep understanding that others look up to. There’s always someone struggling with something that you either know or know how to figure it out.

I’d say average.

In every project and in every team, I end up being strong because I fix the hard stuff. I debug better and I deliver mostly bug free code. My code is more efficient and performant than my coworkers most of the time.

That’s gotta count for something.

Imposter syndrome is good for me. Keeps me learning.

After 6 years of seriously using Python regularly, I’d probably give myself a 6/10. I feel comfortable with best practices and making informed design decisions. I have no problem using linting and testing tools. And I’ve contributed to large open source projects. I could improve a lot by learning more about the standard library and some core computer science concepts that inform the design of the language. I’m pretty weak in web frameworks too, unfortunately.

After almost 12~15 years of programming in C and C++, I would give myself a solid “still don’t know enough” out of 10.

how do you rate yourself in your most used language?

I know things that no human should have to carry the knowledge of

Do you understand the subtilities and the nuance of your language?

My soul is scarred by the nuanced minutia of many an RFC.

in the hope of reducing my imposter syndrome.

There’s but two types in software - those who have lived to see too much…and those who haven’t…yet.

If you step in enough shit you eventually learn to realise when you are about to step in it again. I think the most knowledgeable people are those that have failed the most and found something helpful along the way, seems you are well on your journey so just keep steeping. At some point the abstractions you have control over become unreliable until you understand how they interact with lower level systems and the balance of control comes back because you know know the circumstances in which these abstractions work in your favour.

The more I learn about my language the less I think it matters. Maybe in embedded C you can’t just leave everything to the compiler though.

A one out of ten. I consider myself the world’s second worst programmer.

I’ve learned a lot by breaking things. By making mistakes and watching other people make mistakes. I’ve writing some blog posts that make me look real smart.

But mostly just bang code together until it works. Run tests and perf stuff until it looks good. It’s time. I have the time to write it up. And check back on what was really happening.

But I still mostly learn by suffering.

I’ve been using Scala professionally for 3 years. I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time because we have a ton of implicites and monads and extension methods. I just know the general idea and can get where I want by reading types.

I’ve been creating a language for fun for nearly 6 years. I often don’t know what’s going on under the hood because it’s somewhat complex. I think this is normal for every language. You don’t have to know everything to be able to use it. You don’t have to write blog posts once a week about the language subtleties you found.

Better than many, mediocre.

With my coworkers I’ve got a strange ability to pick up any language that tastes like c, and get stuff done. I’m sure I’ve confused our c# guys when I make a change to their code and ask for a code review, because I’ll chase down quality of life improvements for myself. (Generally, I will make the change and ask if I have any unintended side effects, because in an MCU, I know what all my side effects are, multi threaded application?, not at all)

Edit: coming from a firmware view, I’ve made enough mistakes to realize when order of operations will stab me, when a branch is bad because that pipeline hit will hurt, and I still get & vs && wrong more often than I would like to admit.

What helped me a lot with pushing deeper down into the language innards is to have people to explain things to.

Last week, for example, one of our students asked what closures are.
Explaining that was no problem, I was also able to differentiate them from function pointers, but then she asked what in Rust the traits/interfaces Fn, FnMut and FnOnce did (which are implemented by different closures).

And yep, she struck right into a blank spot of my knowledge with that.
I have enough of an idea of them to just fill in something and let the compiler tell me off when I did it wrong.
Even when designing an API, I’ve worked out that you should start with an FnOnce and only progress to FnMut, then Fn and then a function pointer, as the compiler shouts at you (basically they’re more specific and more restrictive for what the implementer of the closure is allowed to do).

But yeah, these rules of thumb just don’t suffice for an actual explanation.
I couldn’t tell you why these different traits are necessary or what the precise differences are.
So, we’ve been learning about them together and I have a much better understanding now.

Even in terms of closures in general (independent of the language), where I thought I had a pretty good idea, I had the epiphany that closures have two ways of providing parameters, one for the implementer (captured out of the context) and one for the caller (parameter list).
Obviously, I was aware of that on some level, as I had been using it plenty times, but I never had as clear of an idea of it before.

1/10 in python. I took a college course or two and enjoyed it.