Programming Languages Are Like Girlfriends

I was reading this article about a PHP developer’s love affair with Ruby, an increasingly popular scripting language. Like “love affair” implies, it was intense, passionate, difficult, but ultimately ended. Ruby’s greatest asset is that it was developed from the ground up to be strictly object-oriented (that’s way too huge a topic to go into here) in the face of “bastard” scripting languages like Perl and PHP that borrow from several “standard” languages (making them more flexible, IMO). Ruby has received the most exposure via a Ruby-based web-creation framework called Rails, and people swear it’s the best thing since man invented fire. Whatever–I know better and I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid.

Ok, background done–I mentioned all the above so you can make complete sense of what follows. My main point is that the author listed several lessons learned in his torrid language love affair, and this one really stuck out:

#7 – PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE YOU ARE BETTER

Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I say” paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines.

I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP [object-oriented programming]. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby.

But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now! You look back at your old ugly PHP code, compared to your new beautiful Ruby code, and think, “God that PHP is ugly!” But don’t forget you wrote that PHP years ago and are unfairly discriminating against it now.

It’s not the language (entirely). It’s you, dude. You’re better now. Give yourself some credit.

Programming and geekiness aside, I thought that point was very insightful. How many things in our lives do we come back to something, full-circle, and have a vastly different view? By definition, when this happens we have a greater experience base to draw from, and the “time-out” we took allowed us a perspective that would have been otherwise impossible. I think of my impending return back to school and bet that this will factor in somehow.

We all need to experience something different, something that jars us from our current point of view. I’m not suggesting a real torrid love affair (at least not for the married/committed people) to gain perspective or do anything irresponsible, but there is something special in losing oneself in a different activity or interest, pushing boundaries, challenging one’s views, and coming back “home” a better person for it.