alt Hacker News> To be fair, to learn to think, you have to learn the language first.
Which language is the language? A competent programmer can think about programming and reason about programs written in most languages without having to know that particular language intimately (with some exceptions that push outside the normal algorithmic language notation of the Fortran, C, Java, JS, Common Lisp, Rust, Go, etc. family of languages; but those are minority languages and a competent programmer shouldn't need more than a short period of time to become literate, if not expressive, in it).
I meant "a language". Corrected it.
> A competent programmer can think about programming and reason about programs written in most languages without having to know that particular language intimately
That's because the programmer already learned how to program.
But when they started, they definitely didn't write only pseudocode that wasn't runnable (to see the results) for months/years.