Why Learn New Languages N Years into Your Career?

On the Artima Developer site, Andy Dent recently posted today's lead Java Today item, Why Learn New Languages? Being Outlived by C++. Andy is 46 years old, considers himself to have about 20-25 years of full-time work remaining in his career, plans to remain in software engineering, and says "I'm seriously contemplating giving up learning new languages." Would this be a good plan in the case of C++? In the case of Java? I'm a bit older than Andy, and though right now I'm doing more work in the journalistic realm than in direct software engineering, I do still keep my hand in software engineering on a part-time basis. And as recently as six months ago, my work was almost entirely software engineering. At Andy's age, I was working close to full-time on Java development. I had learned Java in the preceding several years, applying it whenever I had the freedom to do so in my daily work. I certainly wasn't anything near being a Java guru, but I was able to get a lot done at the team/project lead level. In my part time, I was editing Java books (which were big sellers at the time). Obviously, today I think it was a very good decision for me to devote lots of time at that point to bring Java into the list of languages for which I could claim a fairly high level of proficiency. Andy's conclusion implies that his mind is made up (he probably won't focus on learning new languages in the futur...

Date: September, 16 2009
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/editor/archive/2009/09/16/why-learn-new-languages-n-years-your-career

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