>But also, learn some other things well enough to be able to use them. Use them when they make the job easier.

I've found that even if I don't need to use a language after I've learned it, the skills and experiences I pick up while learning it improve my code as a programmer.

I've learned how to write fast code in C; learned how to write flexible template code in C++; appreciated the "batteries included" standard libraries of Python; wrote concurrent code in Go; used sum types and functional programming in OCaml.

My friend wrote an article[1] that says there is still no silver bullet for programming, and I agree with her.

Perhaps even if you think it is better to master a single programming language, you might better master it by seeing how other languages approach the same problem.

[1]: https://chameleon.kingdomofmysteries.xyz/articles/harmful/st...

> For example, my main language is C++, and my second language is Java. But when the problem I have is picking snippets of text out of a text file, I reach for Perl, because Perl is far better at that than either C++ or Java. I don't want to "reuse the same [C++/Java] tools and techniques" in that domain - it's considerably more painful than using Perl to do it.

Not convinced. I used to work in a similar way (indeed I would've made a similar argument), using Java for a primary codebase and Python for lightweight scripting around it. But I found that it was possible to adopt a general-purpose language that did both of those well.

I first read that as "bloat" car ;)