I started programming about 35 years ago and professionally about 20 years ago. Some of my thoughts: - Having the theoretical background is most definitely wo

I started programming about 35 years ago and professionally about 20 years ago. Some of my thoughts: - Having the theoretical background is most definitely worth it. I often notice a lack of very basic knowledge on data structures in people who do not have that background. - Having come into contact with multiple programming paradigms (imperative, object-oriented, declarative, logic, ...) gives you access to more techniques to solve problems and to more ways to think about problems. I believe this is useful even if you only "tasted" these other techniques. - I notice that people with a theoretical background are often more fluent in learning new techniques and concepts, and in applying techniques and concepts that they know from one language in another language. Understanding concepts and techniques and being able to apply them in other languages is important. - I believe the field of programming is very big and one person cannot have deep knowledge on every domain in that field. So you have to make choices. In that context I really believe in focusing on broad knowledge in a certain domain and very deep knowledge on a subset of that domain. For example, I personally have broad knowledge on backend development, and deep knowledge on C# and ASP.Net Core. I really do think that deep knowledge is useful. Developers should try to obtain deep knowledge of their main programming language. Deep knowledge means that you know how to write something in a clean and compact way, that you are familiar with the language's idioms, that you are aware of all mechanisms that the language offers you to write code in a clean and compact way. The same goes for deep knowledge of libraries. Deep knowledge is something that you obtain through experience and by keeping yourself updated on the evolution of the language or library. The reason I mention "deep knowledge" explicitly is because I have the impression that deep knowledge is not valued that much anymore. Developers jump to the new hot library before they get a full (or even mediocre) understanding of the previous hot library, or they simply do not take the time to learn the language or libraries that they work with. This can then be seen in the code: bad custom code for things that are built-in in the library, using the library in a non-conventional way, ...