When I was younger I was always playing around with different languages, frameworks, operating systems, etc. While this was a great learning experience in my formative years, I find it boring now. I just want to build stuff, and I just use whatever is the most convenient. Right now, that’s usually Go. Why Go? Because for the last 3 years I’ve been paid to write Go full-time, so it’s “in my fingers” (I also like the language). I realize that for some programs $other_language might be slightly more suitable/productive, but learning a new language or framework takes time, too.
I’ve seen the advice that you should “learn at least 1 new programming language every year” float around a few times. I think that’s nonsense. After the first few languages learning more gets you diminishing benefits. That doesn’t mean I’m against learning new languages – I hope to learn Prolog soon™, because it seems so different than anything I’ve seen before – but there’s more to life than collecting programming languages. For starters, there’s a difference between learning syntax and learning the language. A lot of the meh Go code I see is written by people who understand the syntax, but not the language.
When I was younger I was always playing around with different languages, frameworks, operating systems, etc. While this was a great learning experience in my formative years, I find it boring now. I just want to build stuff, and I just use whatever is the most convenient. Right now, that’s usually Go. Why Go? Because for the last 3 years I’ve been paid to write Go full-time, so it’s “in my fingers” (I also like the language). I realize that for some programs $other_language might be slightly more suitable/productive, but learning a new language or framework takes time, too.
I’ve seen the advice that you should “learn at least 1 new programming language every year” float around a few times. I think that’s nonsense. After the first few languages learning more gets you diminishing benefits. That doesn’t mean I’m against learning new languages – I hope to learn Prolog soon™, because it seems so different than anything I’ve seen before – but there’s more to life than collecting programming languages. For starters, there’s a difference between learning syntax and learning the language. A lot of the meh Go code I see is written by people who understand the syntax, but not the language.