Ask HN: How to keep your skills up to date on all your programming languages?

1 points by shanwang 9 years ago | 4 comments

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?

edburdo 9 years ago |

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 9 years ago | |

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 9 years ago |

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

shanwang 9 years ago | |

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.