Personally, (I can’t speak for everyone, or even most), I find enormous value in breadth of knowledge. For example, purposefully using different programming lan

Personally, (I can’t speak for everyone, or even most), I find enormous value in breadth of knowledge. For example, purposefully using different programming languages and/or different paradigms actually gives me a deeper understanding of the core problems that lie at the intersection of all of the various approaches and implementations of things. Software engineers are first and foremost builders. We take components of varying degrees of abstractness and arrange them together in scalable, fault-tolerant ways that are amenable to change. It is the understanding of the underlying and often transcendent principles of building things that I am a lifelong student of. To borrow the music analogy referenced in the article: you don’t get good at playing the piano by playing the same pieces over and over again. You become a great pianist by understanding and internalizing the relationship between rhythm, scale, then motion of the keys, and the reaction of the listener. You can only do that by playing (and listening to) a wide variety of music.