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Discussion on: 4 Reasons To Stop Caring About Picking The “Best” Language / Framework To Learn - Read or Watch

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Matthew Collison

Such a great example of trying things for the possibility of gaining amazing new insights - and almost always you will, as in your case you certainly have.

It’s too easy to get pigeon-holed in and as an absolute beginner, it might make sense to scope yourself to a limited number of technologies. But not exploring things at a later date when you’re much more comfortable programming in general is just holding you back from a world of possibilities and growth.

GoLang is our next port of call. Seems like it differs in its concurrency / parallelism models and we hardly know anything about that at an expert level as it is, so we’re going head first to see how it can fit into any of our stacks.

Thanks for sharing your experience Adam!

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Adam Crockett 🌀

Admittedly I am several years into my journey to understand programming, but I was once an elitist for my first language, especially when a certain engine became server side as well as in browser. Of course I'm talking JavaScript, it's a big deal but it's got problems that you won't understand unless you branch out. From a career point of view what can you gain from learning any language you feel like? Today I was debugging some acceptance test written in Java, do I know Java? No but I know concepts apply to Java. Get out there and learn programming. Don't expect to be good at everything and most importantly, have a blast!

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Matthew Collison

It's understandable to be elitist about something because it's all you know - it's being stubborn about that when you have knew information that's the problem - for no one but yourself.

And it's awesome that you shared that so openly - it's a show of strong character that you can honestly say that and that you were able to grow through that to where you are now. It sounds like you're learning some amazing stuff.

Let's also not discount how amazing the whole JavaScript Full-Stack thing is... It's pretty amazing that you can use the same language for both your frontend and backend dynamic code now.

We haven't looked into it yet but we think it's why Netflix switched to Node - it must be extremely cost efficient to take out an entire language requirement for the team on a project of such scale. It's still not a reason to be evangelistic about it - it was just super practical for them and it is for a lot of beginners too.

Do you ever just read code from repositories in languages you've never coded in before? That's something I do randomly when I feel like it and I try to look for new language concepts and ideas. It's insightful at times