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In my personal experience the most talented developers have been polyglots. Not that someone who knows only two syntaxes is not useful. It must be like musicians ... when you see a person get off the drums and pick up the guitar ... it just puts you in awe.

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Most programming languages are essentially the same; skills are directly transferable and you just have to learn minor syntactic difference. I would think it would be much harder to master guitar just because one already mastered drums, or the other way around.

Show me someone who has mastered computer graphics and say databases, then I'll be in awe.

I have to disagree, functional and object oriented languages produce very different solutions. Syntax is just the grammar. Compare e.g. Mandarin to a Latin based language and you will see what I mean. :)

But indeed, mastering more areas is even more impressive.

Few languages are pure FP or OOP, at least all the modern mainstream languages are hybrids. How different is python from c#? Ya, they are different but not incredibly so. Definitely not the diff between Latin and Chinese.

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