Developers: You are not a Language
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Developers: You are not a Language
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Developers: You are not a Language
#2Of course I’m not a language, I’m a framework. Never mind “Java,” am I Spring or am I Struts?
Never mind “Ruby,” am I Rails 2.x or 3.x?
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This may seem tongue-in-cheek, but regardless of how we see ourselves, ignoring how others see us is an exercise in frustration:
Re: Developers: You are not a Language
#3Lots of opportunities claim to be a chance to work on interesting problems together with other smart people. Filtering opportunities is hard. Filtering by language is flawed, but what better techniques are there?
Re: Developers: You are not a Language
#4Thoughtful and interesting. This post makes me second guess myself.
As a counter point: I wonder if this is a personal decision. Some people are interested in deep mastery and some people are interested in broad mastery.
Re: Developers: You are not a Language
#5Of course I’m not a language, I’m a framework. Never mind “Java,” am I Spring or am I Struts? Never mind “Ruby,” am I Rails 2.x or 3.x? — This may seem tongue-in-cheek, but regardless of how we see ourselves, ignoring how others see us is an exercise in frustration: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html
Spot on. We're always something. Sometimes we're a language, other times we're a framework or something else. Spend enough years programming and there will always be something in which you specialized. Doesn't mean you shouldn't pick up something different if you want to. Doesn't mean you shouldn't want to, either ;)
Re: Developers: You are not a Language
#6A good hacker can pickup a new language quickly, maybe half hour, or 1 day, or three days for complex ones. But also usually with each language, comes a set of tools and practices, that take a bit more time to become proficient with, and are also necessary to reach a high levels of productivity.
Recruiters expectations varies on each market situation. In my experience, as a freelancer doing remote work, few if any hiring companies are willing to wait that time. You are mostly required to have demonstrable high quality concrete experience in the specific tools to be used.
Various factor are involved in this situation. Among these, one thing is that is difficult to identify good hackers. Also, hiring the wrong person can be very costly for a company.
Hackers have to send the right signals, to surpass these barriers. Some are lucky, and their careers give them the right opportunities. Others doesn't have that luck, and must put an "special" extra effort, to be able to advance and get these "best opportunities".
Re: Developers: You are not a Language
#7A good hacker can pickup a new language quickly, maybe half hour, or 1 day, or three days for complex ones. But also usually with each language, comes a set of tools and practices, that take a bit more time to become proficient with, and are also necessary to reach a high levels of productivity. Recruiters expectations varies on each market situation. In my experience, as a freelancer doing remote work, few if any hi…
HN frowns on novelty accounts and bot posting, but if they were allowed I would write a bot to post this link whenever someone mentions learning a new language quickly:
http://norvig.com/21-days.html
I’m not saying that a good programmer cannot become productive in a new language quickly for some definition of “productive,” but it seems thee is more than meets the eye when it comes to learning a new programming language.
Re: Developers: You are not a Language
#8Of course I’m not a language, I’m a framework. Never mind “Java,” am I Spring or am I Struts? Never mind “Ruby,” am I Rails 2.x or 3.x? — This may seem tongue-in-cheek, but regardless of how we see ourselves, ignoring how others see us is an exercise in frustration: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html
It's worse than that even. In much of Corporate America you are whatever keywords the HR person has been told to look for! Language, framework, operating system ... it's all the same to HR.
Re: Developers: You are not a Language
#9I am not a language, but I have a certain taste in languages.
While I am somewhat capable of coding in Java or C, I just enjoy the Ruby community, the podcasts, the expressiveness of the language and the approach to solving problems way more than I do with the respective C/Java equivalents.
I am not a language, but I'd like to chose the tools that make me happy.
Re: Developers: You are not a Language
#10Defining yourself by your languages also encourages the guys with money to consider you a trivially substitutable commodity, equivalent to any other "resource" with the same keyword set. You probably don't want that.