chrisn-585491 (1/22/2014)
I would say that we have more monolingual programmers now - programmers, including "senior" programmers, who only know one language, whatever it happens to be. This distresses me.
I'll disagree. To develop for web sites you may need to know a whole stack of languages, C#, HTML, JS, CSS, TSQL, PS. And that's just the Microsoft stack. Some of my peers have used over 20 different languages in the last 5 years, not to mention 15 or more different database system.
I agree with ChrisN. I think many programmers know multiple languages, and they should. The programming isn't that much different, IMHO, it's mostly syntax. There tips and tricks that help you be more productive in some languages, but the "get up to speed and code" should be pretty quick.