Shouldn't programmers be polyglot by default. It's like saying there is a conference for golfers who play with more than one club!
I'm sure even your golfer might be interested in attending a masterclass that only covered putting.
Put it this way: Is there a conference for professional basketball, baseball AND ice hockey players? I'm not even aware of anyone who managed to go pro in two of those, not to mention all three.
Most programmers have a preferred domain and language. Once you scale past a pet project and have a decently sized team, specializations start to occur, especially as the code base grows beyond what one person can hold in memory.
I'm reminded of the saying "jack of all trades, master of none".
Programming languages are different. For one, they all run on the same hardware. For another, the basics of logic and such are the same. And for the coup de grace, we have the well-known acecdata that learning a language of a significantly different paradigm than your "main" language generally improves your ability to program in your "main" language, to the point where I and others routinely recommend to people that they learn (or implement!) other language paradigms as a routine, expected part of their programming career. Learning Haskell to the point you can effectively use it can and will improve your PHP.
In the programming field, I don't think you can be a master programmer without being a fairly effective polyglot, as a bare minimum requirement. That is, if someone claims to be a master but they only have fluency in one language, even if that language is C++ or something, I would not consider them a "programming" master, only a C++ master.
Which is a more accurate analogy than a whole sport.
> Put it this way: Is there a conference for professional basketball, baseball AND ice hockey players? I'm not even aware of anyone who managed to go pro in two of those, not to mention all three.
Among athletes that have gone pro in more than one sport, baseball/basketball seems to be a not-unusual combination:
Michael Jordan is probably the best known example, but also Danny Ainge, Scott Burrell, Nathaniel Clifton, Dave Dubusschere, Cotton Nash, and Bill Sharman.
Hockey is a pretty rare combination with either baseball or basketball.
I'd also argue that the skills needed for multilanguage competency as a programmer aren't as mutually exclusive as some of the physical traits needed for pro-level athletic talent.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Jackson [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multi-sport_athletes
There are a handful of athletes that have played both pro football and baseball, Bo Jackson probably being the most famous.
Michael Jordan played pro Baseball and Basketball, but was never a good baseball player
Well, a particularly large hand:
If you are even narrower than "pro" and restrict it to just MLB and NFL, there are several dozen [0]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_athletes_who_played_in_...
Do you have different people in your team: one focused on nginx, one on bash, one on Python, one on PHP, and one on algo design?
> Most programmers have a preferred domain and language.
A preferred domain perhaps. But a preferred language? That smells of sticking to one's (tightly drawn) comfort zone.
I prefer to speak English. Yes, "language is arbitrary", but pointing that out is kind of missing the point, isn't it?
Not to discredit your argument even a bit, but Michael Jordan (MJ23) had a short stunt with pro baseball away from basketball.
That was so easy man :)