That's a dangerous approach. The first language is very hard to learn, because, well, it's your first. And when you stick to one language, you easily conflate the syntax and the semantics.

So when you learn a second language, you have to unlearn the syntax of the first, in addition to learn the genuinely different concepts. Distinguishing the similar stuff in new clothes from the actual new stuff is hard. Simply put, learning the second languages will be very hard as well.

Now your programmer has two data point, and knows with their gut that learning a new programming language is hard. This sets expectation, an will make it harder to learn additional languages. It will take some time to realise learning a new language, besides a few insane exceptions like C++, is not that hard.

> ignore the din of people on the internet who claim to effortlessly, expertly jump among 10 languages as part of their day-to-day.

Jumping from language to language may not be that easy. But one can certainly be an expert at 20 programming languages. Once you see the commonalities, there isn't much to learn. Really, a good course in programming languages is enough to get you started. The hard part is memorising 20 big programming frameworks, with all their warts, special cases and so on. Still, if you know the concepts, learning the vocabulary takes little time.

All of the things you said are true, and yet the beginner has only so much time, so much patience, so much learning to do in one day.

Given this, I see larger advantages to spending all of that time and energy in one ecosystem. There are many perspectives on, say, Java coding styles, patterns, and idioms. One need not go outside a language to do that.

And I would further argue that you simply cannot (usefully) see the global commonalities and idioms among languages until you've been doing this for a while. Years.

As for experienced programmers, I've not known any "experts" at 20 languages, ever. My point was really that this idea is simply the result of run-of-the-mill internet hyperbole.

I think learning more than one programming language at the same time is a great way to help you tease out basic programming concepts from the vagaries in the syntax of an individual language. How to types work? Scopes? Functions? Loops? Arrays? Hash tables? Those are all things that, once you really grok as separate from, say, whitespace problems in Python or curly brace issues in C, allow you to much more easily read and eventually pick up other languages.

On the other hand, learning German after already knowing Spanish was much easier -- and it was much easier to see the similarities and differences between the languages, because my brain would find the Spanish phrase while searching for the German one, and vice versa, but wouldn't get stuck in a loop about it.

American? :-)

Huge portions of the world (Europe and Asia especially) raise children bilingually.

I suspect, (but don't know) this even facilitates the learning of other languages, later on.

I found that switching between languages made the beginner stages of learning much faster. If I got stuck on a concept in one language, jumping to another language often clarified what that feature means. I still use this strategy today.

I learned variables and addition while in javascript, loops and classes in Java, iterators and hash tables (dictionaries) in Python, functions in Clojure, pointers in Go, etc.

Trying to learn all of those things in one language only would have been much more difficult, boring, and I believe I would know a lot less than I currently do.

That's assuming you are not shown the commonalities explicitly, and have to figure them out by yourself. A course on programming languages teaches just that, and it takes only a semester (possibly a brutal one, but still).

> I've not known any "experts" at 20 languages, ever.

Lucky you. I've never met any expert, period.

Anyway, expertise in a language is not interesting. You want to be an expert at programming. Then translating your thoughts in any language is easy —including languages you don't know.

My "expert at 20 languages" isn't really an expert in those languages. She's an expert at programming, and proficient in 20 languages. Personally, that's what I strive for. I'll leave language lawyering to the compiler writers. (I may write a compiler someday, but it will be for a simple language of my own design. I have no interest in cancerous horrors such as C++ —which by the way is the language I happen to know best.)

I am currently going through Learn Python the Hard Way and at the end of one exercise I was doing the extra credit stuff (research online all python formatting characters) and typed in the question verbatim, one of the top answers was from SO, went there to check it out and one of the first answers was:

"So you are going through Learn python the Hard Way and are to lazy to find the answer"

I mean, I understand some of what that person was trying to say, there is some basic etiquette you should follow when asking questions online, but I am very sure a beginner would not know it. And the question wasn't even "Tell me all the python formatting characters" it was asking where to find a list of them. Another answer did point them to the python docs, but I felt that whoever asked the question would be hesitant about using SO again when they have another problem, which is a shame.

The problem with this isn't whether or not that claim is true, but rather that (as you say) its not the right thing for a beginner. Its perfectly fine (desirable, even, IMHO) for an intermediate-to-expert programmer to know many (different) languages and use a few of them regularly (although perhaps outside of JS and whatever you use on the backend, probably daily is a bit much maybe), but this is all distraction for a beginner. Beginners should focus on learning programming concepts, not on learning programming languages (but one language is a requirement, otherwise you can't learn by doing!) Although, Zeds point about learning the basics of four languages still holds - you can do that and then focus on one.

My point is more about the sorts of stories and claims that a beginner will encounter while poking around the usual sites. One could be forgiven for wondering if most HN commentators are 60 year-old polyglots with a security clearance and two failed startups under their belt. It can seem daunting in the right context.

For example, a beginner might phrase queries like "jquery how do I make text appear on screen", whereas a more experienced person might query something like "jquery element insert value".