Choosing what to learn: an analogy to investment portfolios

The field of computer programming is vast, it's hard to know what to learn. An experienced programmer (thank you Warren) suggested an analogy to financial investment: low, medium, and high risk. Here is how I categorize some topics.

Low Risk : how we earn our bread and butter

• Procedural programming
• Object-oriented programming / patterns
• Algorithms (the pragmatic ones)
• C#
• JavaScript
• Git from the command line

Medium Risk

• Vim
• TypeScript
• PowerShell
• OpenId Connect

High Risk : a small chance of a huge payoff

• Functional programming
• The esoteric mathematical analysis of algorithms
• Aurelia

What are your topics of interest? Into which category does each fall? Let me know @dicshaunary on Twitter.