[bborud]

Path of least resistance?

Picking a language (and possibly runtime) is a pretty huge investment if you intend to become proficient. A lot of people like to think that they are polyglot programmers and that language doesn't really matter. But it does. It takes a few years to become a decent programmer in a given language. And if people claim it takes just weeks or a couple of months, it really only tells you that they have very low standards.

If you are familiar with a given language, ecosystem and runtime, and you care about productivity and quality, the path of least resistance is to stick to what you know. Taking on a major project in a language you don't know is a risky proposition. In terms of quality, time, and even in terms of being able to deliver something acceptable.

I tend to have a main workhorse language. It typically takes 2-3 years to reach an acceptable level of comfortable familiarity with a new language. If history is any guide I tend to stick to the same language for 5-10 years. 5 years ago I switched from Java to Go. I mostly worked mostly as a manager at the time, which is why it took longer to reach what I think is an acceptable level. I'd say it is only in the last 18 months or so I've started feeling sufficiently competent in Go to call myself a Go programmer.

That being said: I think the JS space is both a poor technical choice and a poor career choice. The whole ecosystem is janky as fuck, you have to spend a lot of time dealing with silly complexity that tries to fix the jankiness, and the type of work you get isn't very attractive.

[tsimionescu]

It takes years to become acquianted with the library ecosystem of a given language. If you're going to write everything from scratch (especially in a language with an extremely bare-bones standard library), it takes maybe months to become proficient with any language in a paradigm you already know, save a few extremes (C++).