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What's My Job?

I was reading a post on SlashDot.org this week about a developer asking what language they should learn next to further their professional career.  The poster then stated the languages they would not learn because of personal stances dealing with the languages parent company, political stance or whatever.

What an interesting but self limiting point of view.

For me, I can't really care or direct which language I develop with, other than to work for a company that generally uses the languages I'm interested in.   If the job and problems are interesting then the language is maybe not as important as what I'm learning.  I'm excluding the choices of using Perl for client side applications or XUL for business logic type of decisions.  I'm talking about sound business decisions by the company for selecting a toolset for a specific project.

My job is providing a product for the company with the toolset I have.  If I can do this and a fellow developer is always arguing that they must use Language-X, well, you can imagine that the other developer  may not get the interesting projects down the line.

My job is to solve problems and not to create artificial issues based on my personal prejudices.  The benefit I receive from working on other projects and languages is a closer understanding of their, strengths,  weaknesses and proper usage that I can add to my tool chest.  I still retain my core strengths for my professions career but these side paths only help to augment my tool chest.

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