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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"Admittedly, it is hard for me to keep up with the latest frameworks/tools/etc without the context of being a full-time developer,"

It's impossible even if you are. It's probably best to understand this as an instance of the multi-armed bandit problem [1], and the mature full-time developer will eventually settle into an exploitation phase.

There's a lot of nuances beyond that we could get in to, but I think that captures the essence of the situation fairly well. Though I will mention that mature developers also develop the skill to successfully use the experiences of others to judge the payout probability of certain "arms" more correctly than a new person will, which the pure multi-arm bandit problem usually does not encompass.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

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Along those lines, here's a quick read about how "life is a bandit problem."

"When you have more information about what works and what doesn’t, you shift to spending the majority of your time pulling the best lever (exploitation), but you keep exploring the other options in case your current best option isn’t the very best that exists. Here’s the thing: the exploration phase never stops."

https://joshkaufman.net/explore-exploit/

Now I wanna study a multi-armed bandit where levers get added over time, perhaps even one where levers don't have a fixed distribution, but can have some drift.

(grad student here who had a year of his life robbed by multi-armed bandits) It's been tried, if you want to jump in the rabbit hole check out this paper: http://www.kdd.org/kdd2016/subtopic/view/online-context-awar...

It's true. When I first started programming, I was simultaneously learning PHP, Python, Java, SQL, ActionScript, Perl, and Javascript for different classes I was taking and projects I was involved in. When I look back at that time, I wonder how that was even possible mentally. I remember setting up my IDE (which was at that time TextPad) to represent different languages in different colors (I think Java was blue, Perl was brown, and Python was green IIRC).

I've been trying to settle into the exploitation phase now with Ruby, but circumstances are forcing me back into polyglot mode. It's pretty frustrating because it feels like a demotion. Alas, but that's just how the industry is.

Even as a technical person I have a hard time keeping up with HN and the shear quantity and diversity of frameworks and technologies. Thats one thing I like about HN though: when I see new languages/tools/frameworks pop up often and regularly it encourages me to check them out and learn something new that I haven't been exposed to otherwise. Professionally things like Rust have not been relevant for me, but personally I find it very interesting.

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