Last week I came across an interesting word “Polyglot”. It was used to describe a programmer that uses no single programming language more than 50% of the time.

Kind of a unique identifier of people with a broad skill set, which is something we promote on this site all of the time. To my surprise, when I brought it to the attention of Bryan, Kevin and Jason, they were not aware of it, then laughed and mocked the very concept of identifying this skillset. They associated it to web developers and said it had an elitist connotation. I disagree and think it is a fun way to represent a goal of developing a broader skillset, so I did a little research and thought I would share it with you today.

Polyglot developers bring a broad skill set to any team. You might say they are cutting edge. A recent report from Forrester Research (Here Comes the Open Web – Embrace It, January 27, 2012) suggests that CIO’s should begin planning for the influence of the open web to meet the new web economy head on. Since the open web is constructed of 3 key technology bases (HTML5,Mobile and Cloud,Web API’s) and is supported by an open culture among the developers. Businesses will need to support it’s development team to learn the new stack to stay current with the new economy. They go on to cite a rise in polyglot developers and list the most popular languages used. Ranked in declining order they are PHP, Python, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, C#, C/C++.

I also came across the first annual “Vancouver Polyglot {UN} Conference in Vancouver, BC May 25-27, 2012. They also have a ranked order of languages, which are quite different from above. Take a look at http://www.polyglotconf.com/.

So, what do you think? Is this something to strive for or a waste of time? Will businesses benefit with this type of advanced planning or are they late to the gate