Ask HN: Learning multiple languages vs. mastering one

Hi All. I am struggling to find/understand the best path to improve my knowledge/skills. I have a decent knowledge/experience in Java and now I am facing the dilemma either mastering Java or looking to other options to extend my programming language tool set mainly looking at: Javascript/Python/Scala/Kotlin/Elixir/Haskell/Swift.

I am interested in distributed system/data engineering and also in finding easily new well payed job. I know it's not possible to learning and master them all in a short time so I would like to pick 2. What I am struggling the most is how well to evaluate the language and get the best from it. Each time I pick one I end up giving up after 2 weeks as I always go back to Java.

The way I evaluate is simply by going to project euler and go through the problems from 1 to 20 then I don't know the next step to take from there. I find myself going through the crazy articles comparing languages and lose focus and give up.

Would be appreciated if you can share how you manage to focus on learning a new language or if it's worth at all learning/moving to a new language.

Update: forgotten also to ask what language do you advice and in 1/2 sentences why. thank you

I agree, especially if the other language uses markedly different paradigms. Like, if you already know Java, learning C# is not going to massively expand your horizons, the languages are too similar.

Instead, you should try something like a functional language (like Haskell or a Lisp variant), or a dynamically typed language (like Python), or a language with a different memory management model (like C, C++ or Rust). It will give you practical skills and expand your horizons on how to solve problems with programming.

it is worth learning a new language to get a broader perspective on how to write software. you can easily write network services (that can scale later) in java, but not in javascript. you can easily create interactive demos using javascript (with html and css), but not with java.

as for how to stay focused, participate in a hackathon and build something using a new language. i find this helpful as it forces me to learn different features of a language. i don't like to learn a language by following tutorials which treat me like a baby learning to take its first step.

i have little idea about haskell, elixir, kotlin and scala, but here is some advice on the others: javascript: for web dev, interactive demos or quickly writing backend services python: writing scripts, backend for web dev, analyzing data swift: ios apps

I used to be a Java dev (6 years ago)...

Over the last year I've been learning JavaScript + React (frontend) and TypeScript + Node.js (backend) for a side project. At times it's great because you can cobble together all these small modules to build something really quickly and other times.... everything gets updating so often and apis change.....oh I'm going to create a new project.... xyz module needs dependency abc...blablabla.

Also JS on the server is synchronous which is not natural for me to write it. I end up using async/await everywhere except for a few places.

So I've been thinking about to concentrating on a more stable eco-system so I can really master it. With that in mind, I've started learning Golang. Great if you're interested in web servers and distributed systems. It makes concurrency easy and it runs fast. Check out this post: https://grisha.org/blog/2017/04/27/simplistic-go-web-app/

For data you could use Python (#1) but I understand Golang is also a respectable in this arena but probably not the best.

Don't learn a new language for the sake of learning a new language. Learn it because it solves a particular problem better than your existing skill set.

For example Node.js is good for tiny Web Services/API endpoints using an event-based model. Elixir for writing highly concurrent systems.

Sure, both of these can be done with Java -- since it's a general purpose language, but the result with more focused languages is a more succinct solution.