Ask HN: How to keep your skills up to date on all your programming languages?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12966301

by shanwang • 10 years ago

1 4 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

For multilingual programmers, assume your day job only let you program in 1-2 languages, how do you keep your skills up to date for all the languages you are able to program professionally?

dozzie2• 10 years ago

Why do you assume a polyglot would work in a setting that disallows use of other languages?

shanwang• 10 years ago

It's not about top-down disallow, it's just restrictive for many reasons. To use a programming language to build a system within a company, I need not only the approval of my boss but also other developers in my team to know that language or at least eager to learn, that's not always possible.

edburdo• 10 years ago

Why do you need to keep current on multiple languages? Is it to keep you still marketable so you can leave? Or just a bragging right for yourself?

Why not specialize in one or two languages... become a leader and specialist and not a generalist.

dozzie2• 10 years ago

I'll tell you why to keep being a polyglot: to have a choice of tools for solving problems and to have a perspective.

I routinely write tools in half a dozen languages and pretty much always I'm glad that I could choose one or another, because it fits the problem at hand much better than anything else.

And the perspective is about knowing different approaches to a problem. Sometimes I transfer the good ideas from one language/runtime/framework to another, where it makes sense, but is not a common practice. And I can easily use a language I haven't had much experience before, just because it's the same paradigm as I already know from several other languages (I did this a few times already).

And no, I'm not a generalist. I'm quite specialized in my work. I write tools for OS administration.

Ask HN: How to keep your skills up to date on all your programming languages?

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