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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 l
by 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 agoI'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 agoI'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."