>My personal experience is that university grads are much better at adapting to new languages than someone with 4 years experience in only a single language.
These benefits seem dubious to me in the long term unless you plan to work on compilers and languages which is certainly a noble goal and is very much a hot area right now. Picking up brainfuck in a short period of time is not really noteworthy IMO. I am also struggling to come up with a way to present this to other people without coming off as an annoying know-it-all. Do we want to value the ability to sprint or the ability to finish a marathon?
Plus, your memory will deteriorate over time without constant practice. Am I really going to commit time to reviewing all languages I choose to learn every year or so? The article seems like a challenge-to-take more than career advice.
If someone doesn't immediately want to work with languages, I would rather teach them what might be analogous to the lay of the land in our industry:
- What tools do you use to make a desktop application on Windows/Linux/Mac?
- How do the different browsers (Edge/Chrome/Firefox) implement HTML/CSS/JS? Can you make a consistent behaving application for all of them? And why should you run far, far away from any company asking you to support IE8 in 2017?
- How would you make a cross-platform library for Windows/Linux/Mac?
- How would you make a mobile application?
- What are the most popular IDE options available?
- What are the different database options available?
The difference in opinion is exactly teaching more engineering vs. teaching more science, but also learning about the ecosystem that drives language choice and development. This knowledge contributes as much to "knowing the right tool to solve the problem" ability as diverse language knowledge.
> Do we want to value the ability to sprint or the ability to finish a marathon?
We want to value the ability to finish the marathon, which is exactly why it's important to be able to adapt faster. The industry is constantly moving, and someone who can learn new languages and technologies easier/faster is at a huge advantage.
For a concrete example, take Objective-C and Swift. Apple has made it pretty clear that's were things are going, and a developer who has C#, Haskell, Objective-C, Python, Rust, and Ruby experience is going to make that transition much better than a developer with just Objective-C experience. This same thing even applies to frameworks within the same language (think React/Redux and functional programming experience).
> Am I really going to commit time to reviewing all languages I choose to learn every year or so?
Definitely not! You focus on the concepts in the language and don't worry about memorizing anything. Quite a few years ago I learned Go for fun. I basically ignored it after that, but when I needed it for a project recently it came back very quick.
Those other questions you pointed out are, of course, very important. I think you learn the answer to those as you learn languages as well.
These benefits seem dubious to me in the long term unless you plan to work on compilers and languages which is certainly a noble goal and is very much a hot area right now. Picking up brainfuck in a short period of time is not really noteworthy IMO. I am also struggling to come up with a way to present this to other people without coming off as an annoying know-it-all. Do we want to value the ability to sprint or the ability to finish a marathon?
Plus, your memory will deteriorate over time without constant practice. Am I really going to commit time to reviewing all languages I choose to learn every year or so? The article seems like a challenge-to-take more than career advice.
If someone doesn't immediately want to work with languages, I would rather teach them what might be analogous to the lay of the land in our industry:
- What tools do you use to make a desktop application on Windows/Linux/Mac?
- How do the different browsers (Edge/Chrome/Firefox) implement HTML/CSS/JS? Can you make a consistent behaving application for all of them? And why should you run far, far away from any company asking you to support IE8 in 2017?
- How would you make a cross-platform library for Windows/Linux/Mac?
- How would you make a mobile application?
- What are the most popular IDE options available?
- What are the different database options available?
The difference in opinion is exactly teaching more engineering vs. teaching more science, but also learning about the ecosystem that drives language choice and development. This knowledge contributes as much to "knowing the right tool to solve the problem" ability as diverse language knowledge.