If you're an up-and-coming Golang developer, how happy are you going to be when your company takes you off of a Golang project and makes you the new Erlang person?
Now how happy are you going to be when you're informed that you're learning Erlang to maintain an old, flakey codebase written by 2 guys who left the company and are now unreachable?
Oh, and you're going to need to be on call for this because no one else knows how to fix it.
I'm not a <language> programmer. I'm a programmer period.
If I'm a python developer, I'm now spending less time on my core competency, giving other python developers an edge. Seems like you're actually narrowing my career, unless I wish to apply for jobs seeking mediocre Erlang programmers...
so this argues against the theory that learning other languages and other programming paradigms makes you a better programmer in the languages you already know.
Other comments say an engineer is supposed to solve issues with the tools given to them. I can solve issues in other languages, I just don't want to. How does that make me a bad engineer?
The workers are settled and and don't want change. And there's nothing wrong with clocking in and out and not giving a shit about your "career". But there is something wrong with the managers falling for this.
If your product-critical cloud backend depends on people being knowledgeable in a specific programming language, you don't make it a 1/3 time side project for multiple engineers.
Also, if you start giving people "1/3 time" responsibilities, you're one step away from "everything is top priority" territory.
The point is: If you're going to write critical pieces of your infrastructure in a specific language, it's a requirement to have at least one person full-time dedicated to that piece of infrastructure.
When things go wrong at scale, you can't depend on a group of people for whom this is a part-time side project.
In my mind good developers are not <language> developer, they are engineers that solve problems with the right tools.
Given infinite time and no deadlines, sure.
But in the real, you can't expect your engineers to learn entire programming languages and associated ecosystems on the fly as they debug issues in production.
If your Erlang-based cloud backend starts going down, you can't afford to wait around while engineers teach themselves Erlang so they can begin to even debug the problem.
The point is that if you write critical infrastructure in a specific language/framework/ecosystem, you need to have people proficient in that ecosystem who are ready to go. When dealing with production systems at scale, it would be downright negligent to assume you could simply learn the language and framework on the fly if any problems come up.
Maybe the emphasis should be more on the disappeal of your role being changed to maintain an old, flakey codebase than on the language.
