I often read the Hagakure, for no more reason than I liked the sound
of Forest Whitaker's voice reading passages in the film Ghostdog.

Here is a pertinent section I read the other day:

A person who is said to be proficient at the arts is like a fool.
Because of his foolishness in concerning himself with just one thing, 
he thinks of nothing else and thus becomes proficient.
He is a worthless person.

--

Brother Frankus.

¤

IMHO, overgeneralization will tend to give you just enough competence to shoot yourself in the foot in every way you try. I'd much rather have three or four favourite (languages|tools|paradigms|foobars) that I know very well than a dozen that I kinda-sorta know.

--
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
:wq

I disagree with this (I may be disagreeing with the translation of the concepts expressed).

Speaking as much from my years as a professional musician as programming, I feel that it is important for a person's growth that they obtain a level of mastery in something. There is something that comes from taking the journey to complete command over a tool, even if you rarely end up using directly the skills that you aquire.

However, I do agree that it is dangerous to become trapped in a skillset. Flexibility and creativity with one's skills is essential.

ADDED: This is a very zen approach to things.

()-()
 \"/
  `                                                     

"...I believe that neither type of language is properly equipped to handle sophisticated application projects satisfactorily on its own, and I hope to make the case for Perl and C/C++ as the two-language combination mentioned earlier..."

—श्रीराम श्रीनिवासन

Erm, let's look at that statement in its original context..

Musashi was a swordsman -- a warrior. His job was to kill other people before they killed him. And like any decent military strategist, he knew he'd have a much better chance of doing that if his opponents couldn't predict his moves well enough to put a sword right where he was about to duck.

(And speaking of ducks, we fossils who grew up with Daffy Duck cartoons will remember Daffy's immortal performance as Robin Hood: "Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Thrust!", and what happened when Porky caught him at "Spin!" the second time around)

But since when is programming a mutually-antagonistic field?

Sure, there are some good, direct corollaries to Musashi's admonition in areas like cryptography: don't use a Linear-Congruential Random Number Generator for hard encryption, because the numbers it generates have a tendency to clump when graphed in multiple dimensions.. in other words, the LCRNG has a 'favorite' set of lattice points from which it likes to choose numbers. That makes it more predictable, and thus weak in an antagonistic setting.

Most software development isn't antagonistic, though. We tend to cooperate with each other, to the benefit of all. The whole point of the open source movement is to lay things out so everyone can see what we're doing, and the strong growth of open source development suggests that the idea has legs.

In a cooperative environment, predictability can be a Good Thing. We call it 'standardization', and it keeps us from having to solve every problem from the ground up every time. Heck, even in cryptography, the experts prefer to use a known algorithm over a new one, because they've seen the old one stand up to more types of attack.

Now, I realize that getting too perky about standards can lead to stagnation, and I'm a big fan of reinventing the wheel just to be sure that you can. I appreciate the value of diversity, and dislike seeing people work themselves into a religious fervor over the glory of a monoculture.

That ain't what Musashi was talking about, though.. he was talking about how to fillet others before they kebab you.

So let me return an aphorism for an aphorism:

Be sure of your objective before planning your strategy.
Be sure of your strategy before choosing your tactics.

But since when is programming a mutually-antagonistic field?

When a tight labor market dictates flexibility and a broader range of skills. You might need to brush up on your ASP/VB skills in order to get your next contract.

--

You are saying, then, that things could be so desperate that one needs to learn BASIC to get a job? Then it truly is the end of days.

To be more serious, though, Java is probably a better investment of time than VB. At least Java is a programming language.

I have no idea if specialization leads to a form of weakness. Many of the programmers I've met have been highly specialized - not just in language, but in the type of problems they solve with that language. Within that specialization, they do things that are stunning, and possibly a little annoying (smug so-and-so's).

I'll probably never know, though. A short story from Robert Heinlein had a profound impact on me when I was growing up, especially a single line:

Specialization is for insects.

Every time I wonder "why should I learn tool/trick/thingy Y, when X already does the job nicely?", that line pops into my head. So here I am, stuck knowing nothing about everything. Maybe it's better than knowing everything about nothing, though.

"All you need is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure."-- Mark Twain

"If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. It's simple: Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death."

—草薙素子、「攻殻機動隊」

• Learn different technics to enhance your ability, don't hesitate to adapt them
  to your favourite way of acting...
  As a programmer I take idioms/techniques from other language
  (self-modifying code, closure, mixins...) and use them with my favourite language.
  
  
• If you have no other choice you'd better stick to the weapon you know better
  (especially if you're more efficient with it than with the "said" adequate one...)
  Don't get me wrong you SHOULD learn to use the adequate tool WHENEVER POSSIBLE...

"...However, most 侍 did not use their sword as a primary weapon; they used a bow first, a spear next, and only then the sword. Drawing the sword was like letting the soul blaze free when down to the last straw. To have fought until nothing but a surrender is possible was described as 「剣折れ、矢も尽き」 (lit. 'with swords broken and without an arrow'), used as a proverb."

—Wikipedia.org