Programming languages are just tools

I came across You Have One Voice, and it made me think about how my relationship with technology is evolving.

When I was younger, I was very passionate about, and sometimes even religious about Swift. You know when you try to take the language everywhere, that was me. However, as I’ve grown older, and got to work in other technology stacks, I’ve realized that Swift is just a tool. I worked with Ruby building CLIs, then I built CLIs with JavaScript and NodeJS, and tinkered with web technologies like Ruby on Rails in between.

This distancing of Swift felt at times like a betrayal and a lose of identity, and other times like a liberation. My wife loves to say that learning spoken languages opens your mind, and I think it applies to programming languages as well. I have my opinions and preferences, and love to learn from the communities around them, but I’m not married to any of them. I’m seeing them as tools to solve problems.

The mistake that I sometimes make, that’s mentioned in the blog post, and that I should work hard on stop doing, is comparing and commeting on how one programming language is better than the other. It’s just a subjective opinion, and it’s not helpin anyone. All programming languages have their pros and cons, and are surrounded by social and technical contexts that make them unique.

The world is better of if we all work on making our tools better, and cross-pollinate ideas between communities. So I’ll stop comparing and commenting on how one programming language is better than the other. If I love something about Elixir, I’ll say it out loud, because I think it’s important to share the joy, but I won’t do so in the expense of another language.