How to deal with the need to know multiple programming languages? When to stop learning new languages?

Posted by Raphael on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Raphael
Published on 2011-01-11T01:36:31Z Indexed on 2011/01/11 1:59 UTC
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I am a relatively young programmer. I am 23 and I have been programming professionally for about 5 years.

As most programmers I started with C, learned some x86 assembly for fun and then I found C++ which turned out to be my greatest passion in the programming world. Programming with C and C++ forces you to learn platform specific APIs, libs and frameworks all of each requires constant study and experimentation. After some time I had to move on to Java and C# as the demand on my region is basically for these languages. With these languages I entered the world of web development and then I had to learn javascript. Developing for the .NET Framework was exciting at first but I constantly felt as I was getting tied up by Microsoft (and of course the .NET Framework was driving me away from Linux). For desktop development I could do pretty much everything I did with .NET using C++ with Qt but for web development I had to look for an alternative. Quickly I found Django and then I proceeded to learn Python so I could use Django. Nowadays I am learning iOS development with Objective-C.

So far it was pretty much easy to learn all these languages (C++ trained me well) but I am worried that someday I won't be able to keep track of them all. Just to clarify. The only languages I learned cause I had to were C# and Java. All of the others I learned for fun, because I love programming and learning new things. Also I like to keep my skills sharp on desktop, web and mobile development.

My question is: How do you keep track of multiple programming languages? (I mean, keep track of changes to these languages and keep your skills sharp) and: Is there such a thing as enough programming languages?

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