How Religion Destroys Programmers
I discovered something about myself—I have an amazing gift to always make the very best technology choice.
No really, it is quite amazing.
When I look back at my development career, it seems to me that every programming language I was using at any given time was clearly the best one.
The same goes for frameworks and even operating systems.
Yes, I have this amazing ability to pick from the vast ocean of technologies, without even trying them all out, the very best one, and to vehemently defend my choice.
Perhaps as you’ve been reading this, you’ve discovered you have this uncanny ability as well?
Most developers are religious about technology
It’s true.
Don’t be ashamed, you are not alone. Myself, and just about everyone else, is with you.
Some of use are recovering from our self-imposed brain washing. Others of us are blissfully unaware of our predicament. But most of us have at least one religion we’ve managed to craft ourselves.
It is perfectly natural because most programmers got into the field of software development because they were passionate about it. Anything you are passionate about is likely to cause you to develop some highly charged opinions.
Take sports fans for instance. I’m not really much of a sports fan myself, but I know many fans of all different kinds of sports that religiously believe their team is the best despite all the evidence to the contrary.
This defense of our own choices and ideas is core to human nature. It is easy for us to adopt a new idea but we religiously defend the ones we have without needing much evidence to back it up.The problem is we tend to tie up our ideas about things with our identity and even our value as human beings.
It takes some deep soul searching, but it you look within yourself you’ll probably find that you can make a list of the best operating systems, programming languages, frameworks and so on.
Ignorance is not bliss
The problem with this self-imposed religion is that our technological religion blinds us from the truth.
I spent countless hours arguing about why Macs sucked so much before I had even really used one. Ironically, I am writing this post on a Mac right now, but I am using Windows Live Writer which I am accessing through remote desktop. Oh, and this blog post, well, it is actually hosted on an Ubuntu Linux server in the cloud on a PHP application you may have heard of called WordPress.
My point is, most of us vehemently will argue that our technology choice is the best without even having really tried the alternatives.
It seems ludicrous when you think about it clearly, but I still catch myself doing it even today.
When I look within myself to honestly ask the question “why,” I find that most of my motivations come from a combination of pride in what I have learned and accomplished and a fear of what I don’t know.
I find that it is much easier to dismiss a technology that I don’t know as “garbage” or “worthless” than it is to take the time to learn about it and see why others like it so much. As they say, one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.
The problem with thoughtless religion
I don’t need to tell you that mindless religious zealotry is a destructive force in our world. You only need to go to your favorite national news web site or look in any history book to see that is the case.
But, while not too many programmers will draw swords over PHP vs C#—although I have been accused myself of throwing a chair in a similar dispute, a litigious and quite false accusation which I protest strongly to this day—many developers are quite willing to argue loudly about their opinions and even brashly tear down the works of others as I am sure you have seen if you have spent much time on the good ol’ interwebs. I got a nice taste of this bitter water myself when I had the gall to actually post something negative about everyone’s bastard child of a language that was discovered to have royal blood after some years of abuse, JavaScript.
So, while we may think our ignorance isn’t harming anyone and that they deserve it anyway because they are clearly wrong, the truth is, there is quite a wake of destruction that our ignorance can leave behind us.
I look back on my own past and I am embarrassed that I harassed Perl developers to the degree that I did, completely discrediting their work and ignorantly pushing my holy statically typed C-based languages as their one and only savior who could cleanse them of their filth.
But more than anything, I realize that I hurt myself.
Stop hitting yourself, idiot!
The biggest growth in my career came when I was looking for a job doing C# development and found a really good opportunity to act as a technical architect for a project written in Java.
I was quite torn by the decision. In my heart I knew that Java was bad and evil. I knew that because Java lacked properties like C# and required the use of manually created getters and setters that everyone writing Java code was clearly an idiot.
I almost didn’t take the job, but I decided that the pay was too good to pass up and that I would suffer through this awful experience like a prisoner of war until one day my Microsoft would rescue me. I thought I would at least get to apostatize some filthy Java writing scoundrels.
Well, it turned out that after a couple of years of mentoring developers on writing good Java code and unit testing, I realized that not only was Java not so bad, but there were some actual merits of the language and Java frameworks that could be appreciated.
More importantly though, I began to realize that my past code bigotry had closed quite a few doors on my face. It began to occur to me that perhaps all of my technology choices in the past were not necessarily the best. I began to start thinking that there wasn’t actually all the much difference between many of the most popular technologies.
I began to realize that understanding a wide range of technologies and programming languages made me much more valuable than ignorantly subscribing to my own religion about a particular technology that I happened to choose.
I found that my own understanding of individual technologies increased rapidly, because instead of just “eating what I was fed,” I could use my brain to compare and contrast differences between programming languages and technologies which left me with a deeper understanding of all of then.
I was rudely reminded of my own shortcomings that still exist in this area when I recently converted my blogs over to a Linux server in the cloud from Digital Ocean.
I was predisposed to choose Windows technologies for deploying web applications, but it was pretty hard to argue that a complete Linux server in the cloud that performed extremely well for $10 a month was not a good choice.
My point in all this is to say that being closed-minded about technology choices only hurts yourself in the end and severely limits your personal growth as a developer.
(Here are two good books to break down those barriers: Seven Languages in Seven Weeks and Seven Databases in Seven Weeks.)
There is no “best”
I’ll finish up this post by imploring you to believe me when I say “there is no best technology or programming language.”
I’m not going to insult your intelligence by saying that each language has a purpose for a different situation because the truth is much deeper than that.
After creating over 40 Pluralsight courses on a very wide range of technologies and programming languages, I’ve discovered a few truths.
The truth is that there are multiple great ways to do the same thing using different tools and different technologies.
The truth is that all programming languages and technologies have big mistakes and weaknesses in them.
The truth is the more you learn about different technologies, the more you will find that at the core most things are pretty similar. What I mean by this is that most of the core concepts about writing software apply regardless of technology choice or programming language syntax.
You’ll also find, as I have, that if you are accepting about others technology choices and are able to admit your own ignorance and learn from it, you’ll find helpful friendly people willing to teach you what they know, everywhere you go.
(Side note: you may think that I am a big hypocrite with this post, since not too long ago I claimed that C++ was not back and JavaScript was doomed. I believe what I said in those posts does hold true and I don’t think it is contrary to what I am saying in this post. It is possible to have actual critical opinions of technologies you have actually used. You don’t have to like everything. My point is that, even though I dislike C++ for many of today’s programming problems and I feel that JavaScript is not the most elegant language for the web, I do recognize that both of these languages have their merits and that they are valid choices in many situations.)