You can use a language chosen by the middle of the bell curve and still get a lot of satisfaction and success out of being on the right of the bell curve of skill in that language.
This is very good pragmatic and realistic advice and really the only way to stay sane.
If you do want something less mundane than C++, try Rust, it also has a high skill ceiling but you'll spend less of your time fighting tech debt. I think this is the sweet spot for language choice right now, but I can still have a lot of fun writing delicately crafted Go despite the obvious and intentional appeal to the lowest common denominator there.
I personally feel F# is a sweeter spot. Also, I have found Rust jobs hard to get because most positions seemingly want 5-10 years experience. I'm interested in the language but have run out of steam using up my spare time just to learn new languages rather than doing something more interesting or just reading and other hobbies.
Have you found F# jobs more abundant than Rust jobs? We might be in different bubbles. I know F# has been around much longer and is a first-class citizen in Microsoft's ecosystem, but I don't touch that ecosystem much. Shame, too, because I was a Scala fan a decade ago and it was hard to watch that self-destruct, all the while F# endured.
I have found Rust jobs hard to get because most positions seemingly want 5-10 years experience
I would think of that as potential employers screening themselves out without wasting your time interviewing.
The kind of places I've worked already heavily use C++ and Go -- think world-scale production infrastructure with management and control planes -- so many teams adopt Rust in some form at some point. So suddenly a lot of people have, if not outright Rust jobs, then at least jobs where they could spend a large fraction of their time writing Rust, and on exactly the kind of mission-critical performance-sensitive software that Rust is ideal for.
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This is very good pragmatic and realistic advice and really the only way to stay sane.
I personally feel F# is a sweeter spot. Also, I have found Rust jobs hard to get because most positions seemingly want 5-10 years experience. I'm interested in the language but have run out of steam using up my spare time just to learn new languages rather than doing something more interesting or just reading and other hobbies.
Have you found F# jobs more abundant than Rust jobs? We might be in different bubbles. I know F# has been around much longer and is a first-class citizen in Microsoft's ecosystem, but I don't touch that ecosystem much. Shame, too, because I was a Scala fan a decade ago and it was hard to watch that self-destruct, all the while F# endured.
I would think of that as potential employers screening themselves out without wasting your time interviewing.
The kind of places I've worked already heavily use C++ and Go -- think world-scale production infrastructure with management and control planes -- so many teams adopt Rust in some form at some point. So suddenly a lot of people have, if not outright Rust jobs, then at least jobs where they could spend a large fraction of their time writing Rust, and on exactly the kind of mission-critical performance-sensitive software that Rust is ideal for.
Absolutely not. Haha. F# jobs are non-existent. I only meant that from a language point of view.