Shawn's Rants - Episode 5: On Language Elitism

just take it easy man you can't handle the truth forget it donny you're out of your element that's just my opinion i could be wrong hey there this is shaun wildermuth with my rants i had an interesting tweet conversation today about languages what came up was this idea we have about how some languages feel inferior or superior to other languages and that made me start to wonder about my own role in being elitist about languages or such we have all the tech press releasing things every year about the most popular language the most voluminous language on github what languages are rising which ones are falling where to get jobs in the future like all of that really matters in some sense about planning your career and knowing whether you're using technologies that may be going outdated or whether they'll always be jobs for certain kinds of languages but i feel like i had a role to play in there being some elitism you know i used to think a lot about my role as a c sharp developer and a voice in teaching c sharp to a lot of people and i think i looked down or at least jokingly i don't know whether how much of it was joking to be honest with you about vb being less than or looking down at people who do php and i think some in the community also do this with javascript javascript's an interesting one to sort of think about because when i first looked at javascript 15 or 20 years ago now it was a very different language than it is now and it did frustrate me a lot but that doesn't mean javascript is better or worse you know one of the stories i was told a long time ago was that the number one book that was sold from o'reilly for a long time was their vb script book because so many people were using it to build excel spreadsheets or other sort of automation and i think that's an interesting idea you know there's still cnc plus programmers that are voluminous there's rust and go and c-sharp and java and javascript and typescript and all of these and what i hope to do and i hope to encourage you to do if you're watching this rant is to be kind and realize that not every language is suited to everything i think some of this comes from this idea that maybe microsoft is trying to get rid of the javascript ecosystem by embracing web assembly and blazer but i don't think that's really fair either i think that there are different developers that need to do different things and having more options is often the right thing to do i spend a lot of my time in javascript and typescript and a lot of my time at c sharp and that doesn't mean that i think java is an inferior language or that php or any of these we have to realize that we have the right tool for the right time let's take php which i've talked about not liking before but it's just a language that helps a lot of people build and maintain great cms systems you know so much of our world is built on top of wordpress and that wouldn't have been possible without php and so my hope is that we just find a way to be kind to each other and we're not in competition doesn't mean that my language is better or worse or my affinity for type safety versus loose typing or compiled versus interpreted or procedural versus functional versus object-oriented none of that i think matters because at the end of the day we're all trying to create great solutions we're trying to solve problems that's what tickles the little part of my brain that loves this job so much and if we spend our time breaking each other down because of one feature or another one thing we don't like or another i think we're going to be less as a cohesive community going forward the only thing i'll say about this is when you do have opinions about how one language works or how it doesn't work or the things you don't like versus the things you do try to investigate a little because you might learn something that you can apply to your own space that your own home language and environment and technologies and platforms i found this to be really true when i started working with javascript and typescript and i took these ideas about how you construct things in this very different sort of object-oriented world and i was able to bring it back to c sharp and really thrive with some of the use cases you know i wasn't just stuck with always creating concrete classes and not everything needed to be a class and those things that were i thought were important in some of my learnings about c sharp this would be true no matter what you learn i've actually spent the last week digging in very briefly into go and rust and kind of understanding where they're related where they do well and where they don't do well and the complexities of one over the other you know and i felt felt myself getting caught up in it because i started looking at go and rust and i was like well they both use curly braces which makes me a little warm inside because i'm used to c plus plus from years and years back and other languages but one required semicolons and one didn't and that little bit made me go oh maybe i prefer this and then i had to shut down and go stop worrying about your comfort and sit down and learn you're going to learn something from this and some of the ways that functions are developed in those languages i think might teach me better how to construct certain things in c sharp or javascript or whatever language i end up using i don't think at the end of the day the language implies you as a better or worse developer you know we don't want to get into this way of like i'm a c plus developer a rust developer therefore i'm a lower level and i'm a better programmer than you are it's not about those problems it's about the kinds of problems you want to solve if you want to create great uis because you like to interact with the user certain languages are going to be better for that than others if you want to create really fast low-end drivers there are a couple languages that are going to do that incredibly well if you want to be an end-to-end developer maybe something like javascript where you can write the same language on both sides appeals to you i think choice is the final arbiter here i want us to have as many options so we can find the right ones spa frameworks are a good example of this right now in the market there's a bunch felt and vue and react and angular and a bunch of other ones out there and because of the way i like to code i don't really care for yet because i don't really like the way it's coded i don't really care for react does that mean react isn't a good framework does that mean that the people doing react are dumb in some way no not at all and uh because i do primarily view does that mean i'm smarter than the angular people who've been doing that for 10 years no right got to understand that there is not only the technical reason to choose something over the other but there's also a comfort level and a preference like some people like to have things where they're separated in certain ways and some people like to have them all in one place together it really matters what your comfort level is what your organization is and frankly with the skill set of the people around you are those all come into these technical decisions and by trying to have a coding caste system we're not serving anybody well i for one will attempt to do better i will try not to belittle the languages that i want to roll my eyes at because it's not helpful to anyone i know the languages i'm comfortable in writing code every day i'm going to try to learn new languages as i go by and hopefully it'll all work out 35 years in i think things are going pretty well this has been sean wildermuth with another rant don't forget to like this video and subscribe to the channel it really does help us get this video and my other videos out in front of even more people and thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: swildermuth

Views: 269

Keywords: Software Development, JavaScript, C#, Java, PHP, Python, Languages, C++

Id: pZWfy_K-3T4

Length: 8min 41sec (521 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021