Not buying it, anything can learned. I have retooled myself myself several times depending on market demands. Some of the things I have picked up included accounting, financial analysis and vendor management. Anyone can learn anything and not necessarily in 10000 hours.
This is a huge problem with the job market now. They want you to walk in and "hit the ground running" as they like to say. They want to train no one. Its a huge joke as everyone knows it can take anywhere from a week to months to become productive.
When I started at B*ll Labs back in the late 80s there was no where near the focus on knowing syntax, tools and the other gibberish that is demanded today. What they were more concerned with was your ability to think creatively and out of the box.
A basic requirement required that you had a certain kind of degree (mathematics, physics, comp sci, music, art were some of what they preferred) and they gave you a test. It wasnt an IQ test but rather a test to see if you had the ability to conceptualize things. Typical questions were something like this:
A) In the woods was a bear, a dog, a fish and a squirrel. Which one doesnt belong?
B) They would have bunch of odd shapes and ask you which one was the first one in the sequence or the last one in the sequence.
If a tool didnt exist you would build it. This is why Unix has the building block method of development. You just reused what was there and kept going. Object oriented programming is just an extension of that. They keep making it out that object oriented programming is some mystical science. Its just reusing bits and blocks of code. From day one at the Labs this is what you did. Duh.
Frankly I am language agnostic. As someone else said, a language is just a tool to do a job. Thats all. Any language development environment can be learned IF you have the time. Most companies are unwilling to train so you need to be on the stick. This was a big reason I got a way from hands on development. It drove me crazy to have to constantly learn new languages and than constantly have to compete with people on H1B.
Though I had experience with C/C++, Shell (Korn), Cobol, Pascal, PL1, Assembler (MVS & Unix), Java and Perl it wasnt enough. I have seen PowerBuilder, Smalltalk and others come and go. I watched tons of my friends become obsolete over night just because they didnt have the right language of the month.
That whole J2EE thing has taken over and just staying on top of that is a job in itself. No thanks. I dont mind learning but to have the floor yanked out from under you constantly is a huge hassle. I have seen job ads asking for some obscure language and must have 10 YEARS experience.
I have seen ads demanding 10+ years of Objective C on mobile platform now. Frankly unless you have been coding on Mac's for years and years no one is going to have that much Objective C experience.
The whole thing is a farce today because all these H1Bs come here after going through a boot camp in India and profess to be experts in it. Whats the point?
