> This always baffles me. It doesn't surprise me, but it baffles me. Why are so many professional developers having to "reskill" to adapt to a new language?
stretch your thinking a little, it's really not baffling.
you have people who teach themselves to code as teens or younger, then major in computer science then take jobs as professional developers by which time they've been experienced in a variety of programming paradigms, and where the nature of computer science is natively appealing to them.
In some large companies they might find themselves working alongside some people who were English majors/barristas and recently took a coding bootcamp to earn a better living writing some VB. Yes it's going to be harder for the latter group to drop what they know to pick up languages with more complex CS constructs and semantics. It's entirely reasonable for a not-so-experienced VB programmer to consider themselves a professional developer, even if it's a profession that they just took up, or even if they've been at it awhile but all their knowledge is within the VB ecosystem.
stretch your thinking a little, it's really not baffling.
you have people who teach themselves to code as teens or younger, then major in computer science then take jobs as professional developers by which time they've been experienced in a variety of programming paradigms, and where the nature of computer science is natively appealing to them.
In some large companies they might find themselves working alongside some people who were English majors/barristas and recently took a coding bootcamp to earn a better living writing some VB. Yes it's going to be harder for the latter group to drop what they know to pick up languages with more complex CS constructs and semantics. It's entirely reasonable for a not-so-experienced VB programmer to consider themselves a professional developer, even if it's a profession that they just took up, or even if they've been at it awhile but all their knowledge is within the VB ecosystem.