jr conlin's ink stained banana

It's interesting reading The Rant. If you're not familiar with what i mean before you even click on that link, feel free to ignore what follows, it's fairly geeky stuff.

Zed's rant crystallized something that has been picking at my mind for a while. Right now, i do most of my coding in PHP. Before that, i did a lot of Perl. Following the languages i worked in in reverse order i'd add Smalltalk, C++, C, Pascal and a handful of everything else ranging from COBOL to Fortran. i've got a fair bit of digitally linguistic history associated with myself and while i'll never profess to being 100% native in anything, i've come to realize that the actual language makes no difference in the type and quality of code you produce.

Truth is, you can write outstanding or horrible code in anything. i've seen beautifully constructed, efficient algorithms designed in COBOL. i've seen absolute nightmare inducing horrors written in Ruby. Language and libraries, like any other device one has on hand, is no assurance of quality.

The reason i've been thinking about this lately is because of various posts and notes i've read where people decry Language X in favor of Language Y. For instance, i was thinking that i needed to learn Python since a great many tools out there are using it to do clever things. However, digging into Python i realized that it's really about the same level of complexity found just about everywhere. Yeah, Python is more object friendly than Perl is, but provided you structure your class, you've got pretty much everything in both languages, including anonymous closures/lambdas and automatically generated getter/setter methods.

What makes a program good or not is how it's constructed. Much like how some buildings that were constructed out of stone can last for hundreds of years where others constructed with more modern materials crap out after just a few decades.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons that good programmers i know are language agnostic. They really don't care what toolset they use since learning a new one is just a question of learning the syntax and formatting quirks. Sure, they may be most comfortable in something like Lua or maybe tend do quick builds in something like .Net, but if you were to tell them to code to Javascript, they'd shrug their shoulders and dive in. (Ok, yes, some languages have certain built in benefits like PHP works really well with Apache since it was designed to run as a plugin, and Perl has fantastic regular expression handling because, again, that was rolled in very early, but nobody is going to make you write a webserver in Logo. Well, nobody sane at least.)

Yeah, i'll probably putz around with python a bit to get my feet wet with the syntax. And yeah, i did dabble with Ruby a bit to get a sense of what it's like, but i'm not going to be switching over to either of them anytime soon. i really don't see one providing a clear advantage over design for what i need and very little benefit from adoption. Chances are, you may feel the same way about Perl and PHP, which is equally cool with me. i'm more interested in approaches than semicolons anyway and i prefer saving my debating skills for things that really matter.

You know, like why vi is better than emacs.