From what I have seen happen around me, the "new skill" isn't really as new as it seems; it is just tweaking and reapplying the already present skill.
To use human languages as an example, a monolingual English speaker learning Italian, or even the seemingly esoteric Urdu, is not as hard as it seems for all these are of the same (broader) family sharing many similar features, and the skill is transferable easily. However, learning something like Chinese or Arabic and being good at it is hard and only people who have no other choice engage in the activity, and may be stand to benefit more in terms of ROI.
In that sense, I would be interested to know how a C++ guy learnt and became skillful in Haskell or Erlang, more than learning Java or Python and churning out code with them.
Or to use a non CS example, its more interesting to know how a medical student learnt fluid mechanics in order to understand the human body better than to know how a mechanical engineer became a theoretical physicist.
From what I have seen happen around me, the "new skill" isn't really as new as it seems; it is just tweaking and reapplying the already present skill.
To use human languages as an example, a monolingual English speaker learning Italian, or even the seemingly esoteric Urdu, is not as hard as it seems for all these are of the same (broader) family sharing many similar features, and the skill is transferable easily. However, learning something like Chinese or Arabic and being good at it is hard and only people who have no other choice engage in the activity, and may be stand to benefit more in terms of ROI.
In that sense, I would be interested to know how a C++ guy learnt and became skillful in Haskell or Erlang, more than learning Java or Python and churning out code with them.
Or to use a non CS example, its more interesting to know how a medical student learnt fluid mechanics in order to understand the human body better than to know how a mechanical engineer became a theoretical physicist.