TBH, I don't really care about being able to program a nontrivial program in a zillion languages. Cutting code is just a tool.
I much rather want to be able to think in data and I want to be able to easily grok the runtime model of a language, because if I can do that, getting able to write large things in a new language is not that hard. Certainly, if you never knew C and just look at it's runtime model (with the crucial part pretty much being the difference of data on the stack and on the heap), you won't be able to write an industry-strenght *nix-kernel immediately, but on the other hand, after about a week or two of doing stuff in C, you will be able to do quite a lot.
This is also the reason why I look at a lot of languages, but mostly stick with python. Most languages don't offer a better tradeof than python (even though I am still eagerly waiting for Haskell':) ), so I don't see a reason spending a month or two just doing stuff in them. If it grows necessary, I will certainly be able to do so, but currently, I don't need to annoy myself too much :)
I much rather want to be able to think in data and I want to be able to easily grok the runtime model of a language, because if I can do that, getting able to write large things in a new language is not that hard. Certainly, if you never knew C and just look at it's runtime model (with the crucial part pretty much being the difference of data on the stack and on the heap), you won't be able to write an industry-strenght *nix-kernel immediately, but on the other hand, after about a week or two of doing stuff in C, you will be able to do quite a lot.
This is also the reason why I look at a lot of languages, but mostly stick with python. Most languages don't offer a better tradeof than python (even though I am still eagerly waiting for Haskell':) ), so I don't see a reason spending a month or two just doing stuff in them. If it grows necessary, I will certainly be able to do so, but currently, I don't need to annoy myself too much :)