[acroback]

What a terrible advice.

Does author has trouble with discipline?

You don't get anything by learning more and more programming languages. Programming languages are tools, be expert at 2 or 3 languages and that should be enough. Learn anything more to solve a specific problem.

You understand the crux of a language by being expert at it not by "me too" novice at it.

[schwurb]

> You understand the crux of a language by being expert at it not by "me too" novice at it.

Let's not pretend "knowing" a language well is akin to a 10-year-journey like some arcane samurai art.

If you

- could build an interpreter for a minimal version of the language

- can expand most syntactic sugar into more minimal constructs of the language

- can reason about the language in usual PL terms (call-by-value/call-by-name, pure/not-pure, strictly/dynamically typed, ...)

- know the 5-10 most important milestones in the history of that language

- know the standard libraries so that you don't repeat code that is written there,

then what use is there to master a language further? If someone is experienced in language learning, the above can be accomplished for nearly any language in idk, a year? At that point of mastery, it makes much sense to learn another way of thinking instead of memorizing the official language specification verbatim.

A programmer with 3 completely different paradigms to think in will be much more effective than one with just one paradigm to think in. Time is much better spent learning new paradigm than to gain that last bit of mastery.

[shiitake]

The "we use the right tool for the right job" mindset looks good on paper but doesn't scale very well.

Most of the time it tends to favor developers who are the most distracted by the newest and shiniest trends.

It is helpful for any dev team to have 2 or 3 programming languages in their toolbox that they can use to solve their problems. Any discussion about adding a new language to that toolbox would need to involve discussions about QA, deployment and long-term supportability. Unfortunately most developers are less concerned about those "non-technical" aspects.

[nnq]

THIS 100%! ...I'm an extremely undisciplined never-finish-even-starting-almost-antyhing ADHD-I crazed squirrel-brain that never has enough out of learning "just a tiny bit" of some new programming language, new tech, or even entirely new field, but hardly gets good at anything.

Sure, learn one or two languages from completely different paradigms than what you use daily, to broaden your mind and seed stuff in context. But the... STOP! And get more projects finished faster and better instead, you'll learn 100x faster this way, and learn more useful things.

Then learn some time management and communication skills...

[picacho]

touche