DEV Community

Discussion on: How many programming languages should a person know?

Collapse
 
ingosteinke profile image
Ingo Steinke • Edited

Focus vs. as many as possible seems contradictory to me. I would rather focus than diversify too much. Yes, it is a benefit to learn more than one language, and you will inevitably have to do so anyway. Some languages have a lot in common (like C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, CSS and many others use similar glyphs like curly braces / brackets, semicolon etc) while some differ not only in style and syntax but also conceptually (imperative vs. descriptive, compiled vs. interpreted, static vs. dynamic typing etc).

Another aspect to consider when we "know" a language? You can start learning a few aspects of many things to give you a broad perspective, and later specialize in the details of only a few things. @aspittel describes this strategy as "T-Shape your knowledge" in her book What I Wish I Knew Before I Learned To Code.