Nowadays, many people strive to conquer the heights of programming in one language or another. There are debates about which language is better, which is more productive, many developers and beginners focus on benchmarks and foam at the mouth to prove something to each other. This is so childish and so pointless!
Ask yourself the question, what will you create using this or that language? Do you have a startup idea? Can you create something new? Remake an existing one, but make it 10 times better?
If you are offered a job or take tests and interviews, you will be given technologies that you will be required to use. Business, money, and interests of managers who have never written code themselves will carry more weight than the results of your research and study of effective programming languages. This is the fucking reality of the industry today!
Therefore, you need to learn something else: physics, mathematics, chemistry, neurobiology, any natural science. This will give you the opportunity to write something in your favorite programming languages that someone else really needs. Not boring schedules and product lists, mailings and stores, fuck commerce.
Natural on, that’s what should advance your programming knowledge!
I’m an old fart but we learned a lot of languages in school from simple Basic to Cobol, to RPG for corporate reporting, then Pascal and Fortran for engineering, and finally C for the future. And then of course I ended up hired and placed on a DB team to write SQL for years after being hired as a C programmer. But I do feel my years in Liberal Arts majors helped me in many ways through my career and gave me a lot of flexibility to keep finding a niche as the corporate entity changed goals and methods. I trained engineering sw for about half my career and couldn’t have done that without my non computer education
Ditto. Pity that a “renaissance” education is not in very high regard nowadays (or I’m not aware). It’s where a lot of innovation happens, too.