I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
One simple question: ‘Does this solve some problem I have or have an immediate use for me?’
I learned Elixir because I wanted a language to work with that made concurrency dead simple (and you can’t get much more easily concurrent than running on BEAM).
I learned Python because the simplicity of the language lends itself very well to rapid prototyping and because it had an immediate practical use.
I learned JS/HTML/CSS because it’s honestly far easier and more portable than almost any GUI framework you care to name.
I learned Lua years ago because I had an actual use for it (a lot of things embed Lua).
I learned PowerShell (to a rudimentary level) because I needed to do scripting on Windows.
And I have similar stories for most of the other languages I know.
I’m a bit of an odd case though in that I already know, at a passable level when combined with proper documentation, a lot of languages by the standards of most people my age, and therefore chances are I already know a language that covers what I need for any arbitrary project I start.
I agree, it's good to have experience with several languages to be able to choose the one that best fits our context. To automate the processes I needed, Python looked like the better choice, but other languages could have done it too, just not as efficiently as Python.
Thank you for sharing your experience :)
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
One simple question: ‘Does this solve some problem I have or have an immediate use for me?’
I learned Elixir because I wanted a language to work with that made concurrency dead simple (and you can’t get much more easily concurrent than running on BEAM).
I learned Python because the simplicity of the language lends itself very well to rapid prototyping and because it had an immediate practical use.
I learned JS/HTML/CSS because it’s honestly far easier and more portable than almost any GUI framework you care to name.
I learned Lua years ago because I had an actual use for it (a lot of things embed Lua).
I learned PowerShell (to a rudimentary level) because I needed to do scripting on Windows.
And I have similar stories for most of the other languages I know.
I’m a bit of an odd case though in that I already know, at a passable level when combined with proper documentation, a lot of languages by the standards of most people my age, and therefore chances are I already know a language that covers what I need for any arbitrary project I start.
I agree, it's good to have experience with several languages to be able to choose the one that best fits our context. To automate the processes I needed, Python looked like the better choice, but other languages could have done it too, just not as efficiently as Python.
Thank you for sharing your experience :)