[jkire]

> And if what I’m truly trying to do is to learn to think about problems in a different way, a week-long effort at dabbling in a side project isn’t going to change my way of thinking.

I'm not sure that's why people try different languages. Certainly what I've gained from messing around with different languages over time (e.g. most recently rust) is exposure to different ideas and ways of doing things. Do I "think about every problem as if it should be a collection of tables in the third normal form"? No, but when I do need to decide how to store data I have a much better idea of how I would do it, or what I needed to look at.

Gaining experience of a range of ideas is a good thing irrespective of whether it changes the way you think. For example, if you know only one language (or one type of language), it can be quite hard to differentiate in your head whether something is a limitation of the language or a limitation of the problem. ("If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail")

That being said, I do take his point that it is worth spending some time learning about things that aren't programming languages: testing, security, business, etc. After all, software development isn't anywhere near just programming. But really it shouldn't be a question of "do I learn this or that?". Read into things that you're interested in, or that would be useful at work, or just something completely different that will broaden your horizons a bit.

I don't think it matters particularly if that is a new language or not.