Learning a language that is almost completely useless for your company is still useful for you. It adds to your skill set, increases your market value and keeps

Learning a language that is almost completely useless for your company is still useful for you. It adds to your skill set, increases your market value and keeps you learning. Only learning corporate-approved languages is a bit shortsighted. Tech companies, development paradigms and programming languages all have shorter lifespans than humans. COBOL and Fortran, once very successful and popular languages have stopped being mainstream for a while. And those two were the survivors of their batch. Who knows how many then-popular languages have faded away to obscurity? Also you have to keep learning even if you are to stick to the same language. Java is not 1.6 anymore. Languages keep evolving by borrowing good ideas from other languages. So why not use your learning time to stay ahead of the curve? Edit: All languages have their places, even in big companies. Could Whatsapp and Discord have grown at the same pace while using Java/C#? BEAM is the right tooling for them and it has paid off.