Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them

Well, you’re not maintaining the runtime environment ... if you’d like the minimum bytes for everything then consider writing your next app in assembler :)

The purpose with multi language programming is articulating your solution the the least amount of code .

> But for the type of productivity the grandparent post is talking about the language ecosystem can be a bigger challenge, at least for me.

My claim was that:

> learning a new language - and yes, in-depth, including idioms, stdlib, some external libraries, maybe some framework (if needed), and also some facts about the implementation and its inner workings[1] - takes a week at most

I also tried to define "learning in-depth" in another post:

> To me, 'knowing in depth' (as a language user) means that no matter the question, you know where to [quickly] search for the answers. There's no need to remember the answers themselves, although it kind of happens naturally with repetition anyway.

> On the other hand, it's also important to know which questions are not worth answering. [ie. what to ignore while learning]

And I stand by it: I believe that there's no need to memorize too many details to be productive, you just need to be able to quickly and accurately find the relevant details, no matter which details are they. Various docs indexes and viewers, your IDE features, cheatsheets printed on a wall - all of that can help you if you forget a bit of syntax or a signature of a function. There's nothing, other than just reading a book or two, to help you if you don't understand a crucial concept in a language or the architecture of the library/framework.

Also, all these concepts are reused all over the place. For example: "Io is a purely-object-oriented language with prototypal inheritance which allows objects to have many parents." Each word here has a meaning, and that meaning is (well, mostly) standard across most programming languages. With this description, if you know all the words, you just learned 3/4 of all there is to Io OO. Another example: "Dylan is a purely-object-oriented language which is class-based, allows multiple inheritance, and also decouples methods from classes by relying on generic functions, which use multiple dispatch - similar to CLOS." This one is longer, but it's still a single sentence, which conveys most (or if you're familiar with CLOS - all) of the characteristics of Dylan's object system. Sure, there are obviously more features in Dylan that you need to know before you start coding... but they are all defined with a single sentence. It takes half an hour to go through them all, and - again, if you know the exact meaning of each word - at this point you know more about the language than a beginner programmer would learn in a year or two.

> I mean knowing many of the exact APIs by heart

I was like this in the past, so I know what you're talking about. Unfortunately, my epilepsy makes my memory reset significantly from time to time - I can't do it, or at least not for long. It caused a loss of productivity for a bit, but it went back up when I started using well-configured tools. This is why my definitions of "knowing in-depth" above are what they are - I live them, for better or worse.

> (without much looking things up) even if it involved working with images, network requests, JSON, file IO, string processing, dates/scheduling, collections, serialization, menus, windows, controls, input, drawing, sound, etc.

Yes, that's what tends to happen with repetition - unless your memory is impaired in some way - you just remember things. There's nothing else than repetition that can get you to that point, which also means you "only" need repetition to get there. In other words, it happens naturally with time, provided you consistently work with the given tech stack, and that you use it for the various things you mention.

But again: good tooling makes the rote memorization mostly unnecessary, and I really don't see many benefits of keeping all the idiosyncrasies of the whole stack in your head. It's completely different story if you code in Notepad without Internet access, though.

Further, all the things you mention are implemented in all general-purpose languages. Moreover, most implementations look really similar. In almost all languages "network requests" are built upon sockets - an OS-level mechanism. Images are more tricky because of decoding/encoding (which is handled almost everywhere by simply linking to libjpeg & co.), but after that they're 3-dimensional int array/vector/list/what-have-you (yes, there are other representations - and yes, they are all implemented across most PLs and have very similar characteristics everywhere). "file IO", too, is based upon OS-provided streams, or a crippled reimplementation thereof. It's the same everywhere. "collections" are almost language-agnostic: the names and interfaces may (slightly) differ, but the underlying data structures are the same everywhere. "input", "windows", "controls", "drawing" are event-based everywhere, and almost all languages have bindings to all the GUI frameworks. You can write GTK+ app in Python just as well as in OCaml or C# (even though GTK itself is C (I think?)) - and you'll get the same names and signatures, even.

You'll see for yourself in the decades to come - you're likely to switch the stack at least a few times by the time you retire. You'll see that most divisions in programming are illusions and - quite simply - matters of taste/personal preference, while in reality the differences between the popular languages, stacks, framework and systems are miniscule.

> Another big thing was when there are multiple ways do the same thing, having done it both ways and having direct experience of why one choice will likely be more effective in general or for a particular project. This can apply to choosing libraries/frameworks or app architectural decisions.

These are mostly language-neutral - the exact same considerations apply when deciding on library/framework or approach in every single language.

> I noticed I missed this level of familiarity quite a lot when I switched to a different ecosystem later. Maybe this is worse for native UI development because of the large API surfaces. But I found needing to consult the documentation again to be a lot slower.

It could be because of lack of proper helpers in your editor etc., but either way: if you stick with the new stack, you'll learn it naturally with time. You'll forget some of the previous stack (although I'm frequently surprised how I can recall specific quirks in technologies from 20 years ago.), which is also natural. Memory just seems to work this way. It'll take a few months to remember all the relevant details - less if the new tech is similar to something you already know.

> on more timeless knowledge

Like interpreter and compiler architectures, type systems kinds and their meaning, ways of specifying the semantics formally, and also the structure of novel kinds of abstractions proposed by researchers in some experimental languages.

If you learn all of that today, the next time you'd need to learn anything new about a mainstream PL would be in 10 years, if not twice that.

Example: many modern languages only recently started supporting some of the Algol-68 features. That's 50 years to get a lambda into the language...

I'm not really disagreeing that it's possible to be productive without memorizing all that (and I've since moved on to other technologies myself). Also I'm not a vim holdout, I use JetBrains IDEs with all the bells and whistles and use refactoring and keyboard shortcuts etc. But I feel like I was substantially more productive after spending a (relatively) long time on the same stack. So I'm just providing another individual data point that probably more closely matches dxbydt's experience.

Those sort of details I learned from extended use weren't really important for understanding things conceptually. But of course actually implementing something involves going through all the minor details and making lots of small choices. Being able to just breeze through that was really nice.

To use your example of a network request: on iOS it may be true the API is built on top of sockets or kqueue or whatever (I believe they've moved to user-space networking now but I don't really keep up). But you could use the toolkit APIs blocking on a background thread, or integrated with the main event loop with a delegate object, or on the event loop with a callback block. There's trade-offs to different ways of doing it (especially on a team project): some ways are more verbose, some introduce more thread-safety risk, using blocks everywhere may increase the chance that someone generates a memory leak through cyclic references, processing large requests could be more performant on older phones on a background thread, some patterns make it easy to cancel the request, etc.

I don't really miss iOS development. But I do miss the ability to go through all those details/trade-offs as quickly, and I kind of want stick with one thing long enough to develop that again.

Especially because as you observe many of the underlying concepts are the same anyway (especially among the popular languages that are the practical choices for most projects because of ecosystem/tooling concerns). To extend dxbydt's analogy I'd rather focus on the dish (problem-domain) than the cooking instruments.

Learning new languages in-depth is an incredibly taxing thing, because there are whole jigsaw pieces of syntax you have to learn at once. But worth doing the right way if you have time.