This pattern focuses on the idea of establishing yourself in one language that you may be able to base your career in the future, to better prepare yourself for when you get to the career you want to obtain. The most fundamental aspect from the pattern was the community side of learning a language as it states that you become a part of a much larger community of programmers who share their knowledge and even their code for the sake of helping each other learn and grow as developers.
In my Experience I thought if I learned a lot of different languages, I could have the experience needed to land any job I wanted too as I had my foot in more languages than one, but what I didn’t realize is that being a good at one language is better than being decent at many. This was not only reenforced by the pattern discussed here but when I met with a family friend who is a developer at staples, he also dropped that bit of wisdom on me as he too thought that was but as he got closer to starting his career, he focused on mastering java, and it has steered him into a very lucrative job.
Going back to the community aspect the reading mentions how having such large community that works from the same language allows for beginners to have more experienced programmers share the small tricks that they have learned in their experience to give the newer developers a boost in learning. There is a sense of passing the torch in a community like this which you rarely see in other industries, and it is refreshing the lengths that people will go for the sake of knowledge.
Another useful aspect in the reading was the use of testing early on into learning a new language, as I was relatively new to coding when I started my degree, I went based on what the curriculum that the classes had for what projects I worked on. If I had started testing my knowledge earlier on and working on my own projects based on the language that we were learning on my own time I would have accelerated my experience with java.
From the blog cs@worcester – Marels Blog by mbeqo and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.