The article's not bad. His main focus, and he states it, is not to constantly learn new languages for the sake of profit. As a hobby cool, but not for profit. I can agree with that. There are all sorts of topics you could learn for fun and profit, and investing in a new language is not necessarily the silver bullet to mad coin.
Who cares though? I think as long as we're constantly learning, whether it's new programming languages, economics, or snowbaording, it makes life interesting. New skills always seem to come in useful at some point. Make the investment in learning things that interest you and it'll always pay off. Don't let someone else tell you what NOT to learn. That's jut silly. Heck even learning COBOL or FORTRAN would benefit you with a little insight, and might be fun in a retro sort of way.
Yet you profess to think in BASIC, and FORTRAN is very, very similar to BASIC.
I don't follow the metaphor about COBOL. Although it's syntax can be burdensome, the language is very efficient for the same reasons FORTRAN is: static typing, no dynamic memory allocation, efficient file I/O and the best compilers available. COBOL programs are not necessarily flexible, but the are fast and efficient.
Also COBOL has correct "accounting math", something that almost no other language has as part of the core. In fact I can't think of another language specification that implements fixed-point math as part of the core: usually it's part of an external library and is cumbersome to use.
I guess this is why I never post in language threads, we can go on and on all day. No one is right or wrong. Anyway, I'll try to address your comments.
There are so many different versions of BASIC; it's possible we are visualizing very different versions. I am accustomed to using INFOBASIC dialects as in JBase or IBM'S U2 line. Everything numeric is represented as strings (integers) including dates, times, and decimals, so there is no "typing".
As for efficiency, I used to benchmark like crazy, looking for the slickest algorithms and the best implementations of compilers and I/O routines. Not any more. Hardware has gotten so fast that I am more concerned with human time, not machine time. (Naturally, anything that runs 8 million times per second BETTER be fast.)
These days, I generate most of my code, so the verbosity of COBOL (if I used it) shouldn't be an issue. But it is. I have to drop down to the source so often and I work on the code of others often enough, that I am most concerned with getting the whole job done with the LEAST code. This is where "juniors" fall down the fastest (IMO); there's too many places for things to go wrong.
I know what you're thinking, if this is the case, why not learn even more advanced languages and frameworks with even less code. I dunno.
I guess I've "settled into" what works best for me (as everyone should). Is it the best? Probably not. Am I open to better ways? Probably. But not today. Too busy.
Who cares though? I think as long as we're constantly learning, whether it's new programming languages, economics, or snowbaording, it makes life interesting. New skills always seem to come in useful at some point. Make the investment in learning things that interest you and it'll always pay off. Don't let someone else tell you what NOT to learn. That's jut silly. Heck even learning COBOL or FORTRAN would benefit you with a little insight, and might be fun in a retro sort of way.