It certainly can only be healthy to see how things are done "elsewhere", out of your normal comfort zone. The world is not black and white, which means that there will always be *something* to learn from another culture - not entirely dissimilar to actual real world traveling! So I interpret "Learn a new language every year" as more of a guard moniker against growing too conservative and succumb to inbreeding. As Steve McConnell says, "program into a language, not in it".
I suspect the reason why you raise the topic could be because the JVM ecosystem is (or has been anyway) known to be fairly self-righteous and if you are confined to, and contend within this bubble, surely it makes more sense to invest your time studying frameworks and umbrella technologies. That's fair reasoning given that the vast majority of us spend much more time battling API's than we do contemplating how a given language construct works. However I would argue that this is mostly a consequence of Java's staleness, which leads to lackluster peripheral API's which can not inter-operate between one another, and where tooling goes from being a thin veneer to a thick layer of magic paint. So I say, absolutely keep an eye on how other languages does stuff. How to minimize branching (Scala case classes...), avoid null (null coalescing, non- nullability...), avoid casts (generics, inference...) etc. etc. In the perfect world we'd have a succinct language that's completely pluggable and versionable, and it would be increasingly hard to differentiate API from language - nor would you have to. Think about it, since when has "Java" the language carried any concrete skill credibility on a CV? Not since the mid 90's I think. /Casper On Mar 2, 10:26 am, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote: > In the past few years, there's been a lot of emphasis on learning > programming languages, driven by the Pragmatic Programmer's "Learn a new > language every year" maxim and the JVM language boom. It does have a lot of > benefits, but I wonder if its importance hasn't been overestimated. > > Is there something about learning a language that is fundamentally more > mind-expanding than other things, such as: > > - moving from server to client > - learning about asynchronous/messaging architectures > - learning about usability/UX/design > - learning about NoSQL/Big Data architectures > - ... > > ? > > Moandji -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
