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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

To be honest I've never understood that, if you have an app to write, or a problem to solve, or users to help, how using one language over another can make that big a difference to one's overall job satisfaction (assuming of course that said language isn't actually painful to use). If Ruby makes you happy today it will go on making you happy in 2-3 years. Remember what Confucious said, if you chase two chickens they'll both get away.

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To me it concerns such as: - how fast is it changing? Am I going to have to re-learn it every 6 months? - how good are extensions for this language? Will people still be supporting their gems (for example) 2-3 years down the line or will it be a wasteland of abandoned relics? - will a new language have significantly better native libraries that will allow me to do more straight out of the box? - will a new language allow me to do more in fewer lines of code, thus decreasing the amount of mistakes I make? - will there be tons of questions asked about this language so I can google for answers to my heart's content?

Why not just learn both of them? It would not hurt you to have more than one language you are good at, especially if they are very different from each other.

It's mostly a time investment issue for me, and I feel it's true for everybody else. We have only so much time available to learn new things (as opposed to writing production code), and so you want what you learn to pay off as much as possible long term.

You wouldn't argue "Why don't you just learn every language out there?", right?

The prob is that being a "pro" takes a really long time. For example to be a "C#" you need to really dive into the CLR and its internals, be familiar with all of the new features that's been added to .NET in the past years, get familiar with all of the tools out there (VS is basically a topic on its own) and then likely some related technologies like WPF / WCF depending on what you're writing. That's a LOT of learning and practicing for one language, and you probably don't want to throw all of that away long term.

Why not just learn both of them?

Because of Confucious.

http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

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