Comment by Arihant on "Is it good to be a jack of many programming languages or a master of few?"

Master of few. When I started programming a year ago, I'd be swashed away with sparkly little things or big frameworks coming out from every which way and all the time. And in the haste, although I was able to understand the root / base problem in hand, I wouldn't actually do anything to encounter it. So it would be equivalent to cramming things up, even when I understood the basics of it, what use?

This kept happening in my job as junior dev. I looked for the source of this detouring to so many resources and never really learning anything. Turns out for me, it was a job where some colleagues weren't that excited to learn new things and propagate them through the teams in the company. I started feeling a little alienated (and partly because I don't talk much). Hence I quit.

Since I've quit, I've focussed on just two things, in doing those things two small projects came my way (actually 3).

I set out to challenge myself to build a small google extension (kind of one which hashnoders would easily be able to built over a weekend). It was a difficult task for me. Reading so much about Chrome Extensions and top of it the nitty gritty of firebase database and auth. But I did it. 1 week of absolute diving in to specific things. I had never done that before.
A small portfolio website for a friend of a friend using Gatsby (which uses React). This made me want to learn React like never before, and deal with animation state on the page.
I took it in my hands to set up an alumni network for my college, which has none. It's been over 30 years since its inception and it was surprising to me that nobody did anything to sort it out. Hence I started to make something using VulcanJS, which uses React, Redux, Apollo Graphql, Meteor behind the back.

My point with all these point being, that I've chosen to focus to build things with Javascript for time being, since there's so much that I do not know it nudges me and make me cringe to know and apply the things that solves problems (I did try Elm to make a web page once, but that was it).

As a hobby, I explore and make small animation thingies with Processing Programming Language.

There will be other programming languages that I'd eventually use to make somethings, but for now I've chosen to grasp just one.

Thank you so much for your response. I just have another question. Technology keeps changing, updating. If we choose to master only few things and if they get outdated, isn't that a problem?

That's where the fun part begins. Even if what we are investing our time into, gets old fairly fast (that doesn't happen much, but new things are always coming our way), the things that we learn in learning and using them helps us bootstrap into the newer technologies fairly faster.

Besides no person on this planet can be better than the combined collaborative of the technology that is being used by everybody. From that definition not even experts are experts since they are invalidated for some things on the other. And the great part about developers' community is, that they take this very humbly, listening to what other people have to say.

This reminds me of a movie you should watch if you haven't. Man From The Earth.

OK. Now, I can relate to what you are saying. Thank you so much. The only reason to ask this question was, companies keep looking for candidates with a variety of programming knowledge example: Kotlin is a new thing with android development so, companies like Google will consider a candidate having experience with Kotlin and Java over a candidate having Java experience (only). This overall idea is intimidating.

The feeling is mutual. I feel intimidated by things as well. But after a year and half of just getting thinking about it and getting somewhat stressed about it, I could come to just one escape hatch. Sit, learn, code, make things, and the feeling will slowly start invalidating itself, until it is no more. As someone rightly said, the greatest fear of human beings is fear itself. It starts getting away one bug at a time, so keep at it ;) If you are thinking of bootstrapping on Kotlin, I'd love to hear what learn. Blog about it, either here on hashnode or on your separate blog or medium perhaps. One of the biggest push I manage to give myself is blogging things I learn along the way.

Good job on your blog! And sure, with a little more research and study, I will be set to write a blog. Thank you once again.

Shivani Shinde All the very best! :)

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