Polyglot programming and the benefits of mastering several languages

Nice. I should assemble some shell scripts or python to do this now.

It's nice, when doing actual work on a language you have zero experience with, to have a clear intuition about what to expect and what to search for and to feel confident that you'll be able to get things done based on having done it with so many other languages before.

If it's not too unusual, it feels similar to other tools you've picked up before. If it isn't it's interesting.

Something like:

"Oh, OK, Swift has a switch right? Yeah. Does it require me to explicitly break? Yeah. Can I give ranges or patterns?

That's cool, they use named parameters in Smalltalk style, probably comes from Objective C, right?

Nil! charming, like Golang or Pascal.

What do you call these ?. and !. 's? Reminds me a bit of ?. in JavaScript. It's nifty: you can enforce a value not being nil or specify a default..

Hmm, these guards are interesting, how do they work... Etc "

So obviously you need to get someone to check for footguns in your code, but after enough playing with toys you tend to get to a place you can write solid code in a new language very quickly, and where getting to a solid level of competence is relatively quick.

From time to time I've been good enough to think I'm a master of a language. But that skill fades so fast. For some reason the mountains of trivia just sort of fade away without pretty regular use.

Once upon a time, I could tell you all the semantics of `static` in C, but now I couldn't even give an accurate count of all the ways it's overloaded. There's like the top level declaration that sets aside memory, there's the declaration in a function that has slightly different initialization rules and is good for coroutines. And like, 4? more meanings in different locations. I only hit that level because of a compilers class.

I feel like I could ramp back up, but the subtle nuances just sort of flit away like butterflies.

More than 2 seems really challenging. Even simple stuff there's not much to scheme, but try getting a chez runtime running on a raspberry pi, and really understand the impact of the flags you build with and run with. Not easy (for me) to stay really sharp with that.

I mean, sure, I can bang out some code. I can pattern match well enough that code I contribute blends in with the style of a project. But mastery? That's a big lift.

I am disenchanted with "guru level" work in a language. The old saying about "if I'm just barely smart enough to write the code, I'm not smart enough to debug it" is true immediately, and then even more true if there's a 3-6 month delay.

I appreciate being back in a language long enough to not have to look things up all the time, but the dialect of all of them I write in gets simpler and simpler over time.

Portable guru knowledge like "I know how to write an interpreter/compiler" and "I know that for this task there must be a library in $LANGUAGE" and "I know that language construct/function call looks simple but it has to be an O(n^2) algorithm for it to be doing what it says its doing" is much more useful.

I think only very few people can be really proficient in more than 3-5 programming languages (at the same point in time). And with really proficient, I mean both a good understanding of the programming language semantically, being aware and keeping track of newer features in the language and having good knowledge of the standard library of the language (and potentially other common libraries). If you are not proficient in a programming language, you cannot work efficiently with it.

Personally as a backend .net developer, I consider myself proficient in C#, I know some basic SQL, and some basic TypeScript and JavaScript. Earlier on I have touched Basic, Pascal, Haskell, Prolog, Scheme, Ruby, Bash, Java and C. I have worked with several different programming paradigms and I have no doubt that this made me a better developer. Still, I don't consider myself a polyglot programmer. Even though I was proficient in Java and C earlier on, nowadays I would have to search basic things all the time if I'd work with those languages again. So that would not be efficient at all.

In my opinion, the concept of a polyglot programmer is only useful if it means a certain level of proficiency in multiple programming languages and that requires a lot more than understanding the syntax of those languages.