
Ask HN: How to keep your skills up to date on all your programming languages? - shanwang
For multilingual programmers, assume your day job only let you program in 1-2 languages, how do you keep your skills up to date for all the languages you are able to program professionally?
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edburdo
Why do you need to keep current on multiple languages? Is it to keep you still
marketable so you can leave? Or just a bragging right for yourself?

Why not specialize in one or two languages... become a leader and specialist
and not a generalist.

~~~
dozzie
I'll tell you why to keep being a polyglot: to have a _choice of tools_ for
solving problems and to have a _perspective_.

I routinely write tools in half a dozen languages and pretty much always I'm
glad that I could choose one or another, because it fits the problem at hand
much better than anything else.

And the perspective is about knowing different approaches to a problem.
Sometimes I transfer the good ideas from one language/runtime/framework to
another, where it makes sense, but is not a common practice. And I can easily
use a language I haven't had much experience before, just because it's the
same paradigm as I already know from several other languages (I did this a few
times already).

And no, I'm not a generalist. I'm quite specialized in my work. I write tools
for OS administration.

------
dozzie
Why do you assume a polyglot would work in a setting that _disallows_ use of
other languages?

~~~
shanwang
It's not about top-down disallow, it's just restrictive for many reasons. To
use a programming language to build a system within a company, I need not only
the approval of my boss but also other developers in my team to know that
language or at least eager to learn, that's not always possible.

