Sure, but how do you get to know what you are doing if you never use it?
I don't "warn them away" - that just unjustly scares people into not learning a valuable tool. Rather, I point out the dangers, and give them some knowledge of what they're walking into.
In other words, don't tell people not to climb the mountain because it's too dangerous. Tell them it's dangerous, and then point them in the direction of the nearest sherpa shack. ;-) Let THEM decide if/when they are ready.
And anyway, wouldn't it be better for someone to play with C++, blow up their program in a terrifying barrage of segfaults, and then learn "ohhhh, I have to be careful with this", instead of having them never learn C++ until they're asked to use it on the job, and then have that barrage of segfaults be in prod? (Because, yes, that'll happen to some people, because management.)
Sure, but how do you get to know what you are doing if you never use it?
I don't "warn them away" - that just unjustly scares people into not learning a valuable tool. Rather, I point out the dangers, and give them some knowledge of what they're walking into.
In other words, don't tell people not to climb the mountain because it's too dangerous. Tell them it's dangerous, and then point them in the direction of the nearest sherpa shack. ;-) Let THEM decide if/when they are ready.
And anyway, wouldn't it be better for someone to play with C++, blow up their program in a terrifying barrage of segfaults, and then learn "ohhhh, I have to be careful with this", instead of having them never learn C++ until they're asked to use it on the job, and then have that barrage of segfaults be in prod? (Because, yes, that'll happen to some people, because management.)
I recommend that everyone learns lots of major languages in no particular order:
Python
C++
C
C#
F#
Groovy
Basic
Java
JavaScript
Ruby
Bash
Haskell
OCaml
Rust
Lisp
SQL
TCL
certainly not an exhaustive list.