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Personal choices aside (everyone has their own) from a professional standpoint you have to consider that even a mildly advanced Ruby programmer gets a bigger pa

• toyg 15y ago
  Exactly. There are some well-paying niches where a "polyglot programmer" will be required, e.g. C++/Python, Ruby/Javascript... knowing only part of the required combo will likely not get you the job or curtail your remuneration. A career-minded person could just expand his core competencies in order to nail those niches. Not everyone enjoys hacking LISP in their spare time, but expanding your horizons is the right thing to do if you care about your job prospects. If you write for the embedded market at a low level, pick up something higher in the stack; if you only dabble in high-level languages, try looking under the hood; if you specialize in particular technologies (e.g. C#/.net), look at their complementary stuff (e.g. javascript, powershell, or even Java interop and VC++). Also, "learning a language" could just be "learn a big framework / toolset". For example, if you know Python, you might want to pick up Django, or a GUI framework like Qt, even if they are outside the boundaries of what you need at work: they tend to have their own programming style and quirks, so they can be key technologies to bring you new opportunities. Java has boatloads of big frameworks, chances are that you don't know all of them. Ruby people tend to live all the time in their Rails ghetto, but there's a world of libraries outside that. And so on and so on.