

One New Language a Year: (was) Smalltalk - mtinkerhess
http://dustbunnylair.blogspot.com/2009/05/one-new-language-year-was-smalltalk.html

======
cschep
Man it's weird how we (nerds? professionals? anyone really...) can put this
guilt on ourselves. I am in the middle of trying to learn objective-c (iPhone)
and all this Clojure stuff has my head spinning. But..what about your half
done iPhone app? ahhhh.

Balance has to be the name of the game I guess. The worst part is heading back
into work for vbscript after wrestling over "interesting" things in my free
time. :)

~~~
cubedice
That last sentence is key for me as well. I've been working with django in my
spare time (and loving it), then trying to go to work and hack around in
asp.net. Not that I have anything against MS products, but it is difficult to
make that context switch (especially when the overengineering of .net doesn't
buy me much in terms of productivity)

------
russell
I sympathize with the guy. There are so many need-to-know languages and
frameworks just to keep up with making a living that I have a hard time
justifying learning a 30-year-old language that has had the goodness sucked
out of it by other languages. Unless it is spectacularly interesting, I adopt
just-in-time learning, which works pretty well on your 30th language.

------
mahmud
There is no need to learn every "must learn" language out there that gets
hyped. Pick up theories of programming language semantics and a clean, easy to
parse syntax and experiment with every evaluation model your little heart
desires.

The problem then becomes a matter of learning various types of "lambda
calculi", or similar formalism, usually in 10 minutes, and you don't have to
waste a life-time learning the indentation and semi-colon termination rules of
yet another procedural language thrown out at you from the blogosphere.

 _sigh_

