Your Progress As A Programmer Is All Up To You

I don't know if I'd call them "large industry changes," simply because it begs the question of how one defines "large" and "industry." But I know personally I'm facing some frustration as a web developer in my mid-40s due to how much the concept of web developer has become an accelerating target, not merely a moving one. It's only been over the last couple of years that I've started being genuinely concerned that I'm falling behind, but "we're looking for someone who knows Python and Ruby and Coffeescript and AngularJS and MySQL and MongoDB and has previous experience scaling web sites to ten million hits a day" is becoming de rigueur in Silicon Valley.

I don't consider myself too old to learn new things, but there are certain things that are difficult or even impossible to learn noodling around at home -- and even in this Show Me Your Github era, professional experience counts. I'm not sure I'm ever going to be given the chance to learn how to scale web sites to ten million hits a day. I agree with The Codist that as programmers we really are responsible for our own ongoing education, but I'm not convinced that's always sufficient.

I've been just dumb lucky in that the companies I've worked for have been very supportive of individual engineers’ efforts to learn new things. Whether through funding conference attendance and/or travel, or by simply giving employees time during work hours to learn on their own. But the biggest gift my past and present coworkers have given me was demonstrating that learning outside of the job is an essential component of doing great work.

It wasn't until my first few times sitting in on hiring discussions that I encountered professional engineers who didn't take an outside interest in expanding their toolset.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with them. They are fantastic folks who are very good at their chosen profession. And for the majority of professions (I only have anecdotal knowledge of this, but I would love to hear examples from other fields) that is enough to ensure stable employment. But I can't imagine the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that accompanies company layoffs and downsizing when you haven't played outside of your comfort zone in a while.

This is just a long-winded way of saying, “great summation, SheepSlapper!”

> Too many languages will also force your people to have very shallow knowledge.

I spent the last 10 years learning programming languages and PLT; it's a hobby of mine and I put quite a lot of effort behind it. While I certainly forget some things I learned (I regret not using C on a daily basis and not keeping with C++ advancements), at any given time during those past ten years I was fluent in at least 3-4 languages. Without needing a refresher, right now I can speak and I really know in depth the following languages: JavaScript, OCaml, Erlang, Racket, Python, LiveScript and Pharo Smalltalk. I have about 20 other languages I could become similarly fluent in with a week's effort. It's not shallow knowledge, it's just 10 years of work. There is really nothing to force you not to have deep understanding of many different languages and technologies.

On the professional side - I have quite big system under my care which is mixed Python, JavaScript, Ruby and Erlang, not to mention bits of C, shell scripts and Makefiles and two compile-to-JS languages, some compile-to-CSS and compile-to-HTML languages. The system works - and believe it or not, working on it is a pleasure and using the right tool for the job really feels liberating. It let's me move twice as quickly with twice as good results than I'd get trying to do for example fault tolerant, concurrent backend service in Python instead of Erlang (or quick data mining script in Erlang instead of Python for that matter).

I believe using the right tool for the job is the very definition of professional. Of course, the learning curve is probably steeper for newcomers, but for professionals above a certain level language specifics are rather easy to grok and becoming fluent in a language takes a few weeks tops. Besides, it's not like every team member is required to know every technology used in a project - there's a tech lead for this and I wouldn't want to work with one who can't easily convert iterative algorithms to tail-recursive ones and switch from algol-like to prolog-like to python(-like) syntax on the fly.

Anyway, I know what I know and I know what I do and you're basically saying that these skills are irrelevant and using them would be unprofessional. In short, what I'm saying in response is: bullshit.

Oh sure, right now I've been deep into Scheme as I just finished PLAI and am halfway through SICP. I'm not chasing every new Perl derivative every six months, but I'm mostly stuck in the day job using C#. It feels constraining to be learning all this awesome about languages and not get to use most of it, hence the desire to sometimes try other languages at work.

What sort of things have you been learning that you would recommend that are off the beaten path of just another mvc framework? I'm thinking of learning about compilers next, but I'd like a book to work through rather than just "the internet". Also I'm trying to catch the type safety bug by working through Real World Haskell, I'm open to other suggestions for that too.

Though I have no children, I do have a wife I want to spend my evenings with, so I organized my professional life such that I could take a train into work 25 minutes each way. That means I get almost an hour of uninterrupted study time to advance my skills. It has been fantastic. When I get home, it's us time all night. I've been doing this for over a year, and I've seen a profound difference in my skills.