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Comment by oafitupa | Hacker News Reader

Why bother learning another language that is almost the same, like PHP and Ruby? In both you need to keep up with lots of dependencies and practices that keep popping up, and it's a waste of time doing it for both in parallel. I'd say it's better to focus on one language, and if it becomes obsolete I don't see why you couldn't just dedicate a week to master the other one. And anyway I don't see how one of those languages could become obsolete without the other one also becoming obsolete, unless their development stopped for some reason.

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Why bother learning another language that is almost the same, like PHP and Ruby?

Well, OP did say you should learn a "technology as far removed as the one that you are currently using as you can stomach." Some people can only stomach so much.

I don't think that it is possible to master a language in a week. You can learn the basic concepts for sure but there is usually a lot more like idiomatic problem solving, libraries, frameworks, best practices etc.

In my experience you acquire those by working with the language every day for a year or so... and then you are still far away from "master".

And then the job req might demand a "master" or "expert" or a "rockstar", but the responsibilities read like a remedial first semester intro to programming class, and you'll ace the interview if you're not nervous about fizzbuzz. And lacking skilled lower level technical management, your personal success metric will be LOC, so rework makes you look more productive not less. A noob will do just fine on the job.

Sure but I think I'd rather have a developer with 10 years of experience working on a new language with me, rather than someone with a couple of years experience in that language and nothing else.

It didn't take me long to go from Perl to Python (though they are very similar languages aside from Syntax). I knew how to do something in Perl, I would just google for the Python equivalent.

As someone who has mastered Symfony2, learning Ruby on Rails was a walk in the park. There weren't any new concepts to learn, just syntax.

In my experience those concepts are not language-specific. More like platform (eg: web) or paradigm (OOP) specific.

...if you think that PHP and Ruby are "almost the same", you are probably one of the one-trick ponies.

Am I? See my other reply. And now I think you are the one trick pony, who thinks switching languages from the same paradigm is a challenge.

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