Respect your language
Before I take off for the rest of the week, I wanted to talk about something that I overheard during a conversation about development languages.
“I work in language ‘x’ because it is awesome. That other language sucks.” “Oh, ya? Well there is this other language that is worse then that, and those guys are elitist so they all suck.”
Let me ask, what is wrong with the statements above?
As a human being, I am going to have my preference in what I do. What foods I eat (mostly junk food), what kind of drinks I like (beer over wine), and what kind of computers I work on (Apple or Linux over Windows) and while these preferences are my preferences I have learned that they are not everyone else’s preferences and that is ok.
I have also learned over the last few years that these things we use are tools to do a job. Not every tool does something the same way, and that is ok also. I first learned to do “real” programing in collage with C (I dipped my toe into Java before that but didn’t know enough to understand what I was doing). I hated trying to understand all the complexities of C and it really put a fowl taste in my mouth on development as a whole. Yes, when I jumped back in a few years ago I started with Python and it was so much better for me. Does that mean that Python is a better language overall? Not really and I understand the needs and differences enough to say that I don’t like writing in C but I know why it exists and what it excels at to make it important in our ecosystem and respect the people who do choose to code that way.
The same thing with Java, JavaScript, and Swift code that I ran into with an Android developer not that long ago. I have had really bad experiences (as I am sure most people have) with applications written in Java. I remember trying to learn Java way back in high school before I knew what being a developer was (and before my C class in collage). I knew I didn’t like it but the promise of what Java was appealed to a lot of people, as well as people looking for jobs and the high demand of Java developers.
The point being, you write in a language because you choose to. Someone else may not like the language that you write in either. This doesn’t mean we need to talk bad about the other languages out there. To many other things going on in the world to worry about someone calling you and your language the worst thing since . Respect your language and respect other languages. You never know when you might need to learn it to help you in your career.