Discuss: Are you learning too many programming languages?

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Do you have learners syndrome?

I’ve noticed a trend in behavior starting to appear,  especially in the world of technology and software development. I didn’t know the name for it, so we’ll call it learners syndrome for now. It describes a behavior wherein the affected persons are always on a quest to learn but never truly apply the knowledge.

I always see this problem in web development. I’ve observed over recent years that the number of frameworks for the web have increased dramatically. The image below shows just how many there are.

Photo credit: Matt Raible via GitHub.

You can see that in the last five years, there have been a huge number of frameworks. I’ve also noticed that web developers are expected to know a number of these frameworks as if it’s a badge of honor. Why?

I suffer from learners syndrome quite a bit myself, and I have to fight against it. Learning a new language or technology is always a fun experience for me. I’ve found myself building simple web apps using:

• Go
• TypeScript
• NodeJS
• React
• Angular
• Spring
• … x100

The list truly does go on. I’ve built a large number of Todo apps more than I’m willing to admit, and I now consider myself adept at making them. Maybe, I’ll put that on my CV:

Interviewer: Have you built anything that’s in production?

Me: Not really. But I do have a plethora of TodoMVC web apps in my portfolio which I built myself using an isomorphic React server in NodeJS.

Unclear boundaries

The largest problem with having so many of these technologies is that to be a “good” web developer, you’re expected to know most of them, including the back-end ones. I think that’s unfair. Several years ago, the boundaries between a front-end developer and a back-end developer were clear. Today, there isn’t really a boundary anymore; we call it “full-stack.” It sounds like a way to get one person to do twice the work and not really specialize in one of the two areas.

One technology

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