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Well, I kind of agree but you also need a home base language, one that you wrote a lot of code in to drill those ideas into your head. Without writing a lot of

Well, I kind of agree but you also need a home base language, one that you wrote a lot of code in to drill those ideas into your head. Without writing a lot of code and coming across various types of computing problems, you won't be able to go past syntax in other new languages. If I know how closures work, then I can pick them up in Lua or Go or JS very easily, all I need is to figure out the syntax, I already know the computational pattern. On the other hand to get to know how closures work I need to write a lot of them and use them in many scenarios. You kinda need that 'one' language to get the point where you can learn multiple languages well. My cs courses kinda sucked, but one good thing they did was to teach me C, C++ and Java pretty extensively.

pjerem 5y ago
At some point, that ‘one’ language can just be the one you work with at your job. It’s not required to like this langage. My main langage is Typescript in the front end. I hate it with passion (tbh, it’s the JavaScript part and the terrible ecosystem, ts is pretty smartly designed) and it will never be a requirement (on my side) for my next company to use typescript. Even working on front end is not a requirement although I mostly did only that for years. And what made me a better Typescript programmer was to hack some F#, C#, Elixir, Rust, Python… Not even real projects but just little katas and a lot of documentation readings. In my experience, becoming specialist in a langage can even be dangerous if your work doesn’t consists of « framework code » because the more you know about the machinery, the more you are tempted to write code that nobody else will understand. Of course it’s a trend I saw, not a general rule.