Learning another language is _significantly_ easier than learning the first one or two
Learning the syntax, sure. But to be productive at a commercial level in any language these days is about knowing your way around the ecosystem, libraries, tooling etc, and that takes a significant investment of time, and the knowledge is highly perishable.
3-4 languages is probably the most it’s reasonable to maintain and to claim as an actual skill.
This is a very important point: many consultants get exposure to something like that 3-4 language list but most of that knowledge often stale or biased by past projects. This frequently ends up being actively harmful if they’re recommending something which they think they understand but the weightings are no longer correct. I’ve seen that the most in web projects (“you realize we no longer care about IE8, much less 6?”) but it’s pervasive because the cost of learning any two things well enough to do a deep comparison is higher than most places are willing to pay.
This is so overblown. We bring in folks regularly with no experience in our language much less the ecosystem and invariably they’re totally productive in a month or so
Sure, if you work at it full time you could be up to speed in a month, say 200 hours of work. That’s more than a casual investment of time if it’s on top of a full time job as well.
And if you go away from it and come back in 6 months or a year you’ll have to do it over again, some stuff you’ll forget if you don’t use and some stuff will have moved on.
Learning the syntax, sure. But to be productive at a commercial level in any language these days is about knowing your way around the ecosystem, libraries, tooling etc, and that takes a significant investment of time, and the knowledge is highly perishable.
3-4 languages is probably the most it’s reasonable to maintain and to claim as an actual skill.