On the one hand I think it makes sense to put off learning anything new for a few years unless you really think whoa this is going to have staying power.

On the other hand I'll repeat an anecdote I've put out here before - I had a friend I was in a JavaScript course with in 1998 and one day I went over to his house and he showed me the really beautiful table-based demo site he had made to entice employers and I showed him how CSS worked at which point he thundered "That's the problem with this business, there's always something new to learn!"

He is an authority in a field adjacent to software development, but not actually software development. He's a researcher who develops things that happen to be implemented in software (or hardware, given what nvidia does), and "avoid wasting time learning new programming languages" is probably excellent advice to someone in that position. Most HN readers are not.

I had never heard of him, so I took the advice of the previous poster and looked at Wikipedia [1]:

> After one semester at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he transferred to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where received his BA in physics in 1985, and then received his PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1991. He then joined the faculty at Indiana University as an assistant professor. From 1994 to 1996 he was a visiting professor at Cornell University. He then joined the faculty at the University of Utah, where he taught until 2008 when he joined NVIDIA as a research scientist.

I think he probably knows more than you give him credit for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Shirley

Yeah, I don't really care who he is. Nor do I think I should: his advice should either stand or not based on its own merits. There are plenty of successful people that give terrible advice.