Ask HN: How has learning a new language helped you in your career?

Confidence, mostly.

I started out as a .NET developer, and I worked my way up from junior to senior over the space of a few years. At my last .NET role, I helped shape the structure of .NET development for my satellite office and the growing London team.

Despite being considered a decent enough .NET developer, I had felt a bit of imposter syndrome around my skills. In the wider tech community, .NET and C# has always been a pariah, and while looking at who was hiring in my local area, I decided to apply for a role that didn't involve any .NET.

Now, I write Ruby, and while there was a learning curve to start with, I can firmly say that I am capable of adapting to a new stack. I like Ruby, and I still like .NET, but I feel so much more confident about learning new things now that I've proved that I can do it.

> How has learning a new language helped you in your career?

I have a success story, I would not say it helped me in my career. but it made me more confident as a developer.

I was a full-stack PHP developer. In my free time, I always learn new languages (python, ruby, go, rust, OCaml, Clojure, and some Haskell). even now I kinda enjoy learning new stacks. its just fun for me.

For one of our projects (it's back 3 or 4 years ago), we used node. To that point, I never really looked deep into it as I was always busy with go and rust. turns out I was really productive from day one. while others had to do some soul searching.

In short, it made me a better developer and more confident.

I choose the best tool for the job and not necessarily the tool I know, this includes languages but also environments and technologies. I needed Perl (yes, I know), Python, C++, Java, JS, and a few other obscure scripting languages simply because of an existing tool or due to better performance so I simply learnt them.

If you are referring to spoken language, then I learnt Swedish to better communicate with my work colleagues.