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Starts learning programming language and guess what by the time I am done with a language, an another one comes with a bang. #programmerslife

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  • 2
    The last widely used language that appeared is Swift, which was 3 years ago. Before that, the newest language was Kotlin, which is now 7 years. Before that there was Rust. And shortly before that there was Go.

    It's safe to say that good programming languages appear once every 3 years. We're due for another right about now.

    You need a month or two to learn a language decently well (less if you already know a few). If you can't learn a second programming language in 1 year, you should probably choose a different path in life.
  • 0
    Hence my comment on another thread about why learning to program is more important than the language. Lots of transferable skills as opposed to learning one syntax alone.
  • 1
    Javascript libraries and frameworks are even worse. It seems there's a new one every month. For languages I'd recommend learning proven General Purpose Languages that will never disappear rather than the latest fads. C++, Java, Python, Common Lisp, are all great languages depending on what you want to achieve.
  • 1
    @jhole89 I would actually advise people to focus on learning programming paradigms.

    If you know how various data structures work, how memory safety works (or doesn't), what polymorphism, GADTs, and applicative functors are, how closures can memoize state, what the difference between parallel and concurrent is and how languages handle those, understand pattern matching, lambda expressions and higher order functions, you can read through the manual of a new language fast and understand it quickly.

    Although, all of that won't help you to understand even the simplest frameworks, because those often choose to obfuscate things quite a lot for "simplicity"... The only cure there is practice.
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