alt Hacker NewsOne who has a true mastery of programming should be able to write any program in any language, or at least see how to do so, because one thinks in terms more abstract than language-specific constructs yet is able to map them to any language.
Relatedly, here's TLS 1.3 in VB6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35882985
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But you still need to know the language specific constructs.
I can't magically speak German because I know a load of abstract language theory.
And this can work the opposite way. If I know small talk, and then read that C++ can do OO code, I could then think about writing X in C++ and OO being the best model. But I then hit problems when the limitations of OO in C++ become apparent.
In my experience, programming in a language is finding what works in that language, not trying to make the language fit what is in your head.
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What's interesting about it precisely that despite the equivalence (Turing machines and all that) the difficulty to do one thing is a language versus another is what make it prohibitively hard.
If one is "just" translating something that is idiomatic to a language to something that is not in another, it might take 100x for lines for codes in a way that is terribly hard to understand.