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Comment by econnors | Hacker News Reader

I've had this problem as well. I go back and forth between Obj-c, python, javascript, matlab etc. so much without spending a significant amount of time on any one language that I often feel intellectually deficient because I don't know the nitty-gritty details of any of them. Curious to see what others think - is this something I should stop and focus on? Or in today's development environment is it considered acceptable to have to occasionally lookup language nuances in any given situation?

For example, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head how to test for null in python. I'd assume it'd be if(obj), but after a quick google search it seems like if(obj is not None) would be the correct answer.

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I used to be in a very similar situation, but I was convinced otherwise by this article [1]. The fact of the matter is that, yes, it's easy to become familiar with a variety of programming languages, but I think you actually learn a lot more when you double down on a language (platform, ecosystem, etc.) for a long period of time.

Quoting from the article:

> Leaky abstractions mean that we live with a hockey stick learning curve: you can learn 90% of what you use day by day with a week of learning. But the other 10% might take you a couple of years catching up. That's where the really experienced programmers will shine over the people who say "whatever you want me to do, I can just pick up the book and learn how to do it." If you're building a team, it's OK to have a lot of less experienced programmers cranking out big blocks of code using the abstract tools, but the team is not going to work if you don't have some really experienced members to do the really hard stuff.

In areas that I'm just learning or dabbling in (for me, Objective-C), I look things up or reach out to experts. But there are areas where I want to be the expert that others reach out to.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html

http://exercism.io has helped me to write more idiomatic code (submit a thing, get comments, refactor, also comment on other people's code.) Maybe it'd help you for the languages they have examples for?

Thanks, I'll have to try that out.

The bad/goodness of your strategy I would measure by your market success or happiness. Do whatever makes you happy and employable.

Personally, I love the idea of being a generalist. But at the end of the day, you gotta code and code good, specialist or not.

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