alt Hacker News>Knowing two languages isn’t all that bad. Most developers learn many languages during their careers and switch between them without a thought.
One of the most revered programmers in my circle, who's been coding since the early 1970's asked me once, "how many programming languages do you know?". I started rattling off a few, and he stopped me. He said "I only really know the last 2 languages I used".
Jack of all trades, master of none. If someone asked me to code in PHP, Perl or any of the dozens of languages I've used in the past today, just no way. No thank you. Yeah, I used to be very proficient with lots of languages, but no way am I going dust off those brain cells. Assembly is probably the only language I can really get into on different platforms without a huge cognitive context switch, because it's just straight forward, no kooky abstractions.
That said, I've used Javascript for front-end, back-end as well as database (mongo), and it was absolutely great to not have to context switch constantly. I've also done lots of different systems with a wide variety of other languages glued together, and it hasn't been as effortless as using one language for everything. YMMV.
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Many times this. I'm always skeptical if people saying they know 5+ programming languages beyond surface level.
If he can only remember two programming languages then he wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s dev ops, t-shaped, m-shaped world I’m afraid. Imagine asking him to help setup an CI pipeline, or some infrastructure but he’s worried learning a bit of Terraform will make him forget his second last language. You just can’t be like that these days. You have to be a jack of all trades and a master of all trades. That’s just where we are and it’s not going to change anytime soon.