Yes yes yes one thousand times! Thanks Blaine! It's about time someone started thinking deeply about the unexamined "wisdom" wafting around the programming world. Often if you look past the face of these pieces of so-called advice, you don't find any substance. What possible benefit could learning a new language every year provide? Maybe the first three you learn will be beneficial if you pick dissimilar languages like Java, PHP, and Haskell, but after that there are other things a working programmer would do better to learn.
And I think you nailed it when you wrote, "I suspect lots of people stop somewhere between "hello world" and duplicating the code in a tutorial." The recent trend of a new JS framework every three months and an accompanying "to-do list" single page app springs to mind. How many to-do apps can you implement in how many languages, before you realize that you can't apply the principles you learn therein to real production applications in varying domains?
I'm a small business programmer. I love solving tough problems with Python and PHP. If you like what you're seeing, you should probably follow me here on dev.to and then checkout my blog.
Thanks Scott. We live in a fast-paced world but I feel sorry for the devs just starting out who are really struggling with prioritization. The messages we (as a group) are sending to our newest members isn't very helpful and I just wanted to offer a different view.
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Yes yes yes one thousand times! Thanks Blaine! It's about time someone started thinking deeply about the unexamined "wisdom" wafting around the programming world. Often if you look past the face of these pieces of so-called advice, you don't find any substance. What possible benefit could learning a new language every year provide? Maybe the first three you learn will be beneficial if you pick dissimilar languages like Java, PHP, and Haskell, but after that there are other things a working programmer would do better to learn.
And I think you nailed it when you wrote, "I suspect lots of people stop somewhere between "hello world" and duplicating the code in a tutorial." The recent trend of a new JS framework every three months and an accompanying "to-do list" single page app springs to mind. How many to-do apps can you implement in how many languages, before you realize that you can't apply the principles you learn therein to real production applications in varying domains?
Great post and one I'll be sharing!
Thanks Scott. We live in a fast-paced world but I feel sorry for the devs just starting out who are really struggling with prioritization. The messages we (as a group) are sending to our newest members isn't very helpful and I just wanted to offer a different view.