Well, if I'm not allowed to casually wave my hand and invoke my legendary army of VB forms developers, my "argument" will evaporate, as you no doubt suspected. :)
Because, alas, I can't name any talented folks, working on interesting problems, who are obvious under-dabblers. This may be because I have led a sheltered life: Too many of the programmers I know are from MIT, where until recently they inoculated everyone against underdabbling by making them take an entire course on Scheme. I tend to work on open-source stuff that's hosted on Linux, another community where underdabbling is rare and overdabbling is the danger. I read news.yc, which incorporates plenty of dabbling -- much more than I have time for, really, and perhaps more than you have patience for. ;) Finally, I myself am only a programmer because I kept dabbling in software while I was supposed to be working on physics. If I had the personality that found it easy to focus strictly on one thing, I'd be a semiconductor process engineer right now.
Of course, the statements that the original article took such exception to -- the ones like "you should learn a programming language every year" -- are largely intended for the less-talented people that have just been defined out of the discussion. And, again, that's kind of where the original author ends up: "Once you learn one language... oops, make it two languages... no, five! Once you learn five languages, you should definitely stop dabbling!"
Because, alas, I can't name any talented folks, working on interesting problems, who are obvious under-dabblers. This may be because I have led a sheltered life: Too many of the programmers I know are from MIT, where until recently they inoculated everyone against underdabbling by making them take an entire course on Scheme. I tend to work on open-source stuff that's hosted on Linux, another community where underdabbling is rare and overdabbling is the danger. I read news.yc, which incorporates plenty of dabbling -- much more than I have time for, really, and perhaps more than you have patience for. ;) Finally, I myself am only a programmer because I kept dabbling in software while I was supposed to be working on physics. If I had the personality that found it easy to focus strictly on one thing, I'd be a semiconductor process engineer right now.
Of course, the statements that the original article took such exception to -- the ones like "you should learn a programming language every year" -- are largely intended for the less-talented people that have just been defined out of the discussion. And, again, that's kind of where the original author ends up: "Once you learn one language... oops, make it two languages... no, five! Once you learn five languages, you should definitely stop dabbling!"