I tend to believe that it's important for a developer to pick up a couple of languages. But a point that I often see people miss is that it isn't so important to learn the language's libraries and basic syntax, as it is to learn the languages idioms.
There have been many times that I have seen Java guys learn ActionScript3 only to misuse properties (unecessary Java style setter methods everywhere, no closures, etc) and other features simply because they didn't learn the core values of the platform. I doubt that they really gained much lasting value from the exercise in the end, despite using it for a few months.
A few days with Clojure or another functional language in which they really focused on the core idioms of the language would have been more valuable from a learning standpoint, IMO.
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I tend to believe that it's important for a developer to pick up a couple of languages. But a point that I often see people miss is that it isn't so important to learn the language's libraries and basic syntax, as it is to learn the languages idioms.
There have been many times that I have seen Java guys learn ActionScript3 only to misuse properties (unecessary Java style setter methods everywhere, no closures, etc) and other features simply because they didn't learn the core values of the platform. I doubt that they really gained much lasting value from the exercise in the end, despite using it for a few months.
A few days with Clojure or another functional language in which they really focused on the core idioms of the language would have been more valuable from a learning standpoint, IMO.