DEV Community

Discussion on: How many programming languages should you support for a business?

Collapse
 
david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

Do not limit yourself to a specific language group. Instead learn the design patterns behind the languages. All OOP languages are made of conceptual objects and permit polymorphism; just different syntax. All functional languages are... take a guess, functional paradigm implementations. XML derived markup languages are... you guessed it, XML paradigm based. If you can read Java, you can read C#, PHP, ASP, etc.

The second pillar to understand languages is tooling. Every worth its salt language has a debugger w/ stepping, a stack / call tracer, and a way to measure performance. The nice to use ones have editors with these built-in / plugins available.

My personal position is one of 'right tool for the job'. Don't pigeonhole yourself. PHP is a great web app language, Golang is amazing for perf. and concurrency, JS is the only option for browser side, and Java is a solid enterprise app/desktop language.

To limit yourself based on language count is to close yourself off from many valid solutions that would make you a more effective dev. Especially the understanding of different solutions approaches based on different design patterns.