On the consulting world I work on, there is only space for polyglots.

The customers dictate the technology stack and we are expect to be able to dive in, learn what is missing from our side and start developing.

Well in other consulting worlds, and lucrative ones at that, they specifically ask for people like C++ experts, Java experts, Fortran and Cobol experts etc. Heck, I've seen people specialized in some specific vendor toolset get top dollar from consulting.

Just like our field.

You just need a mix of real experts, the ones dealing directly with the customer on site, with a blend of not so experts hacking along a few lines behind in the battlefield.

When one those "not so well experts" gets the next gig, they are themselves experts in the said technology. :)

This is the age of Google. And in top of that all oop languages are basically based off eachothor. On top of that intellisense. I don't see what's so hard.

This only covers a small subset of languages.

Dynamic languages like python or ruby have very malleable definitions of what a class is, and a lot of static verification you can be used to in C# or Java isn't there anymore.

Pattern-matching heavy languages like ML have much simpler object heirarchies than what you might find in OO languages, and have different design patterns to compensate.

Purely functional languages like Haskell require a completely different way of thinking about state (seeing how there is none on a purely language-semantic level).

There are many languages worth looking at that are not OO, and the lessons learned from really trying to learn them and their design patterns can make your code better in your "native" tongue.

C# supports dynamic typing BTW: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264736.aspx

Try some non-oop languages (e.g. Haskell, Clojure, Prolog, etc.) They're not so easy to switch between.

However, once you grok a new language paradigm -- like functional programming or logic programming if you only knew OOP -- you get to see the world in a whole new way and then you realize the new way isn't harder, it's just different. It's experiences like these that reveal a bigger picture. It's experiences like these where you become more aware of how easy and limiting it is for our minds to get locked into certain ways of thinking.

With each new lens you come face to face with the reality that the fewer mental models you have, the more each one colors what you see, think, and believe -- the thought patterns driving your decisions and ultimately setting your trajectory. It's experiences like these that transcend tech and reveal what Alan Kay means when he says "we see things not as they are, but as we are" and "a change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points".

Between, say, Python and Haskell is a pretty solid difference. If you spread out your known languages well enough, however, most languages become very close.

Only if you stick to the language grammar, instead of the mathematical concepts, eg Lambda calculus, Logic, ...