If you saw my previous post on how I learn new programming languages you may be wondering how (or even if) I remember all these programming languages, now this is a valid question as the saying goes "Jack of all trades and master of none though oftentimes better than master of one". That's exactly what I am gonna discuss today
About the saying...
Jack of all trades and master of none though oftentimes better than master of one
From Wikipedia: "Jack of all trades, master of none" is a figure of speech used about a person who has dabbled in many skills, rather than gaining expertise by focusing on one.
Read this wikipedia article to learn more.
This is the same for me to some extent, I know a bunch of programming languages but I would not say I am a master of any of them other than Python. I can say that in other languages I know enough to do simple tasks, things like Data Types, Variables, Keywords, Logical and Arithmetical Operators, If else conditions, Loops, Arrays, Functions. But just knowing that isn't gonna make you a master in any language.
So what do I need to become the master
Standard Library
The first thing is to learn the standard library it has and what you can do with those. For example the python standard library documentation contains more than 200 libraries (Run help('modules') in repl) and the node.js built-in module list has more than 25. There are stuff like stringprep, rlcompleter, tabnanny, reprlib, linecache, imghdr, fileinput, contextvars, mmap are just to name a few that are unheard of in normal day to day coding.
3rd party libraries
Another thing to know to become a master is 3rd party libraries, these are not officially made by the language developers.
For python things like requests, pylint/flake8/pep8, numpy, pandas, Django/flask, Pillow, matplotlib
Being able to make (almost) anything
You should be able to code stuff easily as long as it isn't based on other things such as mathematics.
What about you?
I would say I am a "master" in python and nothing else really, I do sure know a lot of stuff but I would not consider myself a master in most of those. Even then there are things that I still don't know and am discovering regularly in python. I often see myself searching google for stuff in other languages since I forget them but googling shouldn't be seen as a bad thing. The main purpose is to make something. Things I use frequently are things I remember and things I don't use frequently, I often forget.
To be able to forget means sanity.
- Jack London, The Star Rover
What about me?
So if you want to remember stuff you have to practice. Once I had stopped using python for a month and after that, I had to try to remember some stuff and search google because I forgot them. Practice makes perfect.
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