Of course never all at the same time. But each for long enough to see my expertise swinging from one area to the next, which comes with waning of knowledge. Yet I feel like through the Internet I came to be exposed to other professionals that even when experts in some specific tools, what they care the most is a «philosophy» of software. People that may chose a given language not because it has the better syntax or the better tooling (and we know some of them are horrible in that regard) but because they put forward a way to write software

Programming languages, even domain specific, exhibit features and constrains that embody a way of thinking about writing software. That state shouldn’t be mutable is like a principle, isn’t it? Or that memory shall be handled manually. Or that actually programs are just little objects except they are connected as prototypes not built with classes. And that’s an interesting thing to think about for its own sake. And when you become an X programmer you have less chances to see the other ways in which you could do the same stuff. Which is funny because programmers like to say that tools are adequate depending on the job. And then they grab the same old hammer

And here I can connect to the concept of community: although I’m not a Haskell programmer, I’m super interested in functional programming. Although I’m not a Rust programmer I’m interested in other ways to handle memory beyond a GC. And so on and so forth. I’ve learned a lot from people writing in languages I don’t know, that posted hot takes on things, I just went and checked them out, had stupid thoughts about software, and later I could, or not, apply on my own writing. A lot of that has disappeared