in reply to Why learn another language?

So...why would I need to learn another language other than for the journey along a new path..?

To swipe an old saying that Apple once swiped:

The journey is the reward.
By getting out and seeing more of the world, you're exposed to different perspectives, different ways of approaching problems, and different tools. All of which you can bring back to enrich whatever rut you've chosen to live in.

I'm not a particularly great Perl programmer, but by having worked in Smalltalk many years back I can do things with objects in Perl that amaze people who think Perl is merely a scripting language. By having worked in C, C++, and Java (and *cough* VB), I can intelligently compare and contrast them. And if I get into a project where some of these languages need to co-exist, I'm not lost. By having debugged in all of these environments, I've amassed a big bag of tricks.

You can do a lot of things in Perl, but Perl isn't the world. Get out and travel a bit.

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Re: Re: Why learn another language?
by Ryszard (Priest) on Nov 17, 2002 at 19:04 UTC
    The journey is the reward.

    good call, I was going to write something along these lines as well... :-).

    While I havnt had much experience with Java/C(++), I've done some VB, pascal (and delphi), plsql (and sql), js, basic, vbs perl, and all the "easy" languages to program in.

    To change tact a little, I've found my archetitural skills are the skills I've honed further. The project's I've been involved in, perl has been sufficient (and more than capable), however the implementation of the design becomes the critical factor of the success of the project.

    Moving from inline code, riddled with globals, to subroutines and passing references to a nice abstracted set of reusable modules has made life easier and more maintainable for me.

    So, why learn another language? because you can.. :-)

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Re: Re: Why learn another language?
by chicks (Scribe) on Nov 18, 2002 at 15:49 UTC
    The journey is the reward.

    Bah! The ability to look at things differently is the reward.

    But really we are in agreement. It's well accepted wisdom in many places that programmers who can program in more languages can program better in any given language. This can be absolutely stunning to watch in practice. There have been a number of times I've seen someone with a dozen languages tucked away in their brain walking into a new language X and within a matter of days producing cleaner, better code than people who have spent twenty years mastering X. Specialization and focus can be very self destructive in this business.

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