Learning yet another new language for the sake of just knowing another language? Not particularly.
There's an incredible amount of churn in the web languages/frameworks arena. A few years ago it seemed like every week another PHP "MVC" framework was released with exactly the same features as the last one, but with claims that it was faster, more robust, more extensible, and so on. At one point the "big players" were CakePHP and CodeIgniter. Now they seem to be Symfony and Laravel, but feature-wise there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of difference to how your application is structured in these particular frameworks.
Now the churn seems to have shifted away from PHP to JS and JS build systems, and lo and behold we have Imba, "a new programming language for the web".
Sometimes these tools offer clear advantages, other times not so. But often the lifespan on these seems to be less than a year. Everyone is excited about Backbone for six months, until Ember comes out and now no one talks about Backbone. But then Angular comes out and no-one talks about Ember. Investing time in learning any new tool can feel like a huge waste of time when there's a high chance that said tool will disappear a year or so down the line.
Moving this away from the land of web, a new language should at the very least offer a new perspective on something, for example Rust's approach to memory management is intriguing enough for it to potentially be worthwhile.
I like learning new skills and techniques. A language with a different syntax and some sugar-coating that is fundamentally the same as something I already know isn't that.
There's an incredible amount of churn in the web languages/frameworks arena. A few years ago it seemed like every week another PHP "MVC" framework was released with exactly the same features as the last one, but with claims that it was faster, more robust, more extensible, and so on. At one point the "big players" were CakePHP and CodeIgniter. Now they seem to be Symfony and Laravel, but feature-wise there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of difference to how your application is structured in these particular frameworks.
Now the churn seems to have shifted away from PHP to JS and JS build systems, and lo and behold we have Imba, "a new programming language for the web".
Sometimes these tools offer clear advantages, other times not so. But often the lifespan on these seems to be less than a year. Everyone is excited about Backbone for six months, until Ember comes out and now no one talks about Backbone. But then Angular comes out and no-one talks about Ember. Investing time in learning any new tool can feel like a huge waste of time when there's a high chance that said tool will disappear a year or so down the line.
Moving this away from the land of web, a new language should at the very least offer a new perspective on something, for example Rust's approach to memory management is intriguing enough for it to potentially be worthwhile.
I like learning new skills and techniques. A language with a different syntax and some sugar-coating that is fundamentally the same as something I already know isn't that.
But maybe I'm just bitter ;)