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.
replyIf 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.
I've had the unfortunate exercise of copying an API from pure android java to typescript because "they are similar". It goes against best practices and creates all kinds of weirdness resulting in a finished product which is almost the same but far enough away you could just as well have designed a better API in a few hours from scratch (the real complexity is in the backend of the code, not the interface fortunately). But requirements must be met.
replyBut you still need to know the language specific constructs.
replyI 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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