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Discussion on: "Am I a bad developer?" - A question developers commonly face

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Dave Cridland

For a JavaScript programmer, learning Python isn't going to teach you very much. You'll pick up a handful of new ideas, perhaps, but really not very much - it'll be more of a different perspective on the same ideas.

Learning C++ will teach you a whole load of new ideas, many of them all at once. That'll be really helpful, and teach you a range of new approaches to solving problems. Many of them will apply to JavaScript too (though some will not, and you'll pine for the convenience of, say, RAII).

Learning a pure functional language will give a new set of approaches. You can use these approaches in JavaScript (and this, in particular, has been quite a fad recently).

Broadly speaking, learning the syntax is uninteresting, and won't make you a better programmer. Indeed, if you're anything like me, it'll make you worse as you try to remember the distinction between => and -> in different languages...

But learning new approaches that are idiomatic for different language environments will allow you to apply those to your JavaScript, TypeScript, or whatever else you're faced with.