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I wonder if this obsession with languages happens in rotor her spheres? Do Russian novelists think about switching to Spanish? Do English authors miss the subtl

I wonder if this obsession with languages happens in rotor her spheres? Do Russian novelists think about switching to Spanish? Do English authors miss the subtletys of French? I've noticed hat some programmers become so obsessed with not being left behind, that they spend every year learning some new flavor of the month. Of course MS promotes it, that's their job. But great software takes time to do right. Programs that matter, programs that will last will take longer than the hype-cycle for any one language. MS Office is still written in C++, the Linux kernel is still in C, Google uses Python, Facebook favors Php. I bet there are great Java apps, and countless other worthwhile projects in more languages than you care to guess. The permanent generalist flits from language to language, going with the flow, but misses the satisfaction of building something special. Something that took 10 years to perfect, and then 10 more to make even better. They happily guess that an iPhone app takes 200 hours (when it's more like 2000) - they cannot imagine the sheer boredom of working on one project for 10 years. They don't even know programs last 10 years. Today I worked on on of my projects, which started in 1996. It is more satisfying today than before because we're solving a complicated problem, which makes an enormous difference to our customers. We measure our users in thousands, not millions, but for those thousands, we make lives better. I write with a language you've probably never heard of. We use the WIN32 API as our main OS framework. If we abandoned the job tomorrow I'd pick up a book and learn something else. I trained in C, and have so far skipped over Java, and C#. When we needed web stuff I learned JavaScript et al. It's not so hard. My advice, worry less about the language, less about whether your skills are in the latest fashionable language or framework, and a lot more about what significant problem you intent to solve over the next 10 years. Language and frameworks will always be changing, but end-users don't give a toss what language you use. They only care about the problems you solve.

bmj 15y ago
I think your writer analogy is a bit flawed...it may be more of a question of a poet trying to write creative non-fiction, or a novelist writing sonnets. The language is the same, but the framework is different, and in some cases, you may never grok the new framework as well as the one you know. Yes, people do it, and do it well, but I suspect most don't. That said, I agree with your basic premise, but you need to keep your skills sharp. If you work with a single language and a couple of frameworks for several years, you may lose the ability to quickly learn a new language if the need arises, especially if it requires a change in the way you approach the problem.
- bruce511 15y ago
  I've been doing this 20 years, and so far (apparently) I haven't lost the ability to learn. Many of my clients are in their 60's and are way brighter than me. They seem to learn just fine. I'm not worried that missing some framework, or flavor-of-the-month will inhibit my ability to adapt when needed. It's not like you turn 40 and magically give up learning anything new. Indeed the experience along the way allows you to see that very little is genuinely new.
  - bmj 15y ago
    I'm not suggesting you need to learn the flavor-of-the-month, merely that you don't become so comfortable in your current toolset that you perhaps can't quickly learn something new. For me, it's a matter of assessing whether, in certain instances, language/framework A offers some benefits for the given problem over language/framework B. Too many developers just say "well, I've got this here hammer, and that screw kinda looks like a nail."

bmj 15y ago

I think your writer analogy is a bit flawed...it may be more of a question of a poet trying to write creative non-fiction, or a novelist writing sonnets. The language is the same, but the framework is different, and in some cases, you may never grok the new framework as well as the one you know. Yes, people do it, and do it well, but I suspect most don't. That said, I agree with your basic premise, but you need to keep your skills sharp. If you work with a single language and a couple of frameworks for several years, you may lose the ability to quickly learn a new language if the need arises, especially if it requires a change in the way you approach the problem.

bruce511 15y ago
I've been doing this 20 years, and so far (apparently) I haven't lost the ability to learn. Many of my clients are in their 60's and are way brighter than me. They seem to learn just fine. I'm not worried that missing some framework, or flavor-of-the-month will inhibit my ability to adapt when needed. It's not like you turn 40 and magically give up learning anything new. Indeed the experience along the way allows you to see that very little is genuinely new.
- bmj 15y ago
  I'm not suggesting you need to learn the flavor-of-the-month, merely that you don't become so comfortable in your current toolset that you perhaps can't quickly learn something new. For me, it's a matter of assessing whether, in certain instances, language/framework A offers some benefits for the given problem over language/framework B. Too many developers just say "well, I've got this here hammer, and that screw kinda looks like a nail."