Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder3.hal-mli.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.earthlink.com!news.earthlink.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 11:41:17 -0600 Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:41:13 -0800 From: Patricia Shanahan User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: java developers References: <32752303.88.1322663566686.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@prfx15> In-Reply-To: <32752303.88.1322663566686.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@prfx15> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Lines: 34 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 70.230.194.31 X-Trace: sv3-gWfO7VH8IVLvAnILDNMRVczPRGMi0CqV4fdysph7yA4T0IQBYa8Tt59arm84ujj+HhgbZqTxLDnyNde!RV4LlWmW/60skRGB32u4jQyTvFObK5sK1y5V1AX6Ej53dL41CccgJPh9umz1VAdkYqp7dLUEHbyl!7kJuaxdK/G9UkoT3hju6vgbwQUZs/EzZ1s2eODGa3SuK8A== X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3179 Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:10369 On 11/30/2011 6:32 AM, Lew wrote: > Eric Sosman wrote: >> Questions very like yours are sometimes posed by people seeking >> to enter the programming trade and wondering which language to build >> a career on. If that's your situation, then once again the question >> makes little sense. This is a fashion-driven industry in many ways, >> where languages and frameworks and disciplines and paradigms rise and >> fall like hem lines. You may make a career as a programer, but you >> will not make a career as a Java programmer or as a Python programmer >> or as a COBOL programmer or as an AnySingleLanguage programmer. Expect >> to use many languages over time, some regularly and repeatedly, some >> just a few times in special cases. If you're the world's best Java >> programmer but will not learn Guava or Canberra or Mastodon or >> whatever the next fashion is, your career will be brief and boring. > > Not entirely true. There are plenty of COBOL programmers out there who don't need much of a second language. There are AnySingleLanguage programmer career tracks that are long and boring. > I think a good strategy is to begin by learning a popular language that shows up in a lot of job ads, and also learn at least one language that is very different from it. The point of learning a very different second language early is insurance against needing to learn other languages later. Some people who learn only one language initially build its assumptions so deeply into their thinking that they cannot learn to program effectively in any other language. That is fine if they guess right, and the first language is going to stay popular for another 50 years. It was a disaster, for example, for some people who learned an assembly language in the 1960's and could not shift to high level languages in the 1980's and 90's. Patricia