If you are like me, who does programming for living, if you are very passionate about one language and would never ever think of switching to any other language?
Then this blog post if for you.
During my engineering days, i was very passionate about C++ and only C++ (does not mean that, I am any less passionate about C++ today). I wanted to do programming only in C++. I thought I can do anything and everything in C++. But i had no idea there exists a altogether different world outside C++ ecosystem. I was very apprehensive to do programming in any other language.
Then during my final year summer break i read Java after lots of coersion from my friend ovais. And i started appreciating java because of its clean pointer-free syntax. It does not mean i am scared of pointers but that now i can be more focused on problem solving. How elegantly it does memory allocation and garbage collection etc. I started appreciating the high productivity I could get using Java.
Than i joined TRDDC and went on writing java code for more than 2 years. But meanwhile i got interested in distributed computing and machine learning stuff. And while reading machine learning blogs, python piqued my interest. I did a little bit of python on my own and realized the power of dynamic language. But real power of dynamic language dawned to me when i started using ruby and rails.
In a week long bootcamp at Thoughtworks i also touched the basics of C# and realized it is actually very similar to java and i was productive in less than 1 hour. In last one year i have also done some hello world kind of stuff in erlang, clojure.
All in all, learning each language has given me a different perspective to think about the problem i am solving. It introduces me to a altogether different world like ruby ecosystem is full of gems and if you don't like certain gem fork it on github and make changes as per yours wish. .Net world is very organised and Microsoft provides a very rich API set and also they have done a tremendous job in building their visual IDE. Java has largest ecosystem with big communities like apache, eclipse and corporates like oracle, IBM, Google.
Loving one programming language means you will miss the other worlds. Moreover most of these language implement same concepts i.i OOPs. So moving from one to other should be a fun journey of comparison and discovery of little variations of same concept.
Thats why i say Don't be in love with programming language, love concepts ;-)
With this note i close the 2010. Hope to learn more concepts in 2011.
Cheers,
