10 Reasons to Learn a Computer Language

1. It’s the new Hotness from your Favorite Company. Microsoft’s Visual Basic, Silverlight, C#, and more I probably don’t know. Google’s Go. Now Apple has Swift. How swiftly will it be adopted and/or dropped?
2. The new guy knows it and you want to not seem behind the times. Not me but I have known people that seem to want to learn a language so they can add it to their list of hated languages. Heaven forbid you mention something new and useful for some problem set.
3. Your professor is only accepting assignments in that language this semester. True story. Hello Modula-2!
4. Your boss thinks it’s the new hotness. True Story. Hello Ada! Or was that the old Hotness?
5. To show up your pals who hate anything but “insert pet language here.” True story. Hello Perl.
6. To teach your kids. True story. Hello Scratch.
7. To sell an app. The hottest app story drove a lot of devs to learn Objective-C. Not because they wanted to wrap their mind around it, but because there was money there to be made.
8. Because a new toolset is written in it so you might as well jump in and learn it so you can use the toolset and expand it. Many times and each time it is a learning experience. Sometimes the language sticks and I find uses for it, other times it get’s relegated to the garbage heap…free memory.
9. Because you like to try different things to expand your knowledge and depth. I learn it if it looks fun, useful, or the cool kids are using it and it is getting a lot of word of mouth action. If a lot of devs like it then there might be something good there to check out.
10. Because you love to learn new things. That’s me. I can’t help myself but to find new things to learn just for the fun of mastering something new. Lots of my favorite programmer friends are the same way. We don’t do it because we have to, we do it because we can and because we love to.