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by jkaptur 3751 days ago
I used to be in a very similar situation, but I was convinced otherwise by this article [1]. The fact of the matter is that, yes, it's easy to become familiar with a variety of programming languages, but I think you actually learn a lot more when you double down on a language (platform, ecosystem, etc.) for a long period of time.

Quoting from the article:

> Leaky abstractions mean that we live with a hockey stick learning curve: you can learn 90% of what you use day by day with a week of learning. But the other 10% might take you a couple of years catching up. That's where the really experienced programmers will shine over the people who say "whatever you want me to do, I can just pick up the book and learn how to do it." If you're building a team, it's OK to have a lot of less experienced programmers cranking out big blocks of code using the abstract tools, but the team is not going to work if you don't have some really experienced members to do the really hard stuff.

In areas that I'm just learning or dabbling in (for me, Objective-C), I look things up or reach out to experts. But there are areas where I want to be the expert that others reach out to.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html