My interest in programming languages
Not objects I want to obtain, nor places to visit one day
I have no bucket list in any sense
I have a minute list instead
a list of items I wish I had the time to do
I wish I had a hundred minutes for each
When they ask me what I want for my birthday, I point at the list
This is not exactly true
I keep track of the items in my mind
Why don’t I put it on paper?
That would make me depressed
to see an infinite list of things I’ve never got around to do
I feel it infinite
maybe a few items less
It doesn’t matter why I started to write them down
(It actually does, let me come back to the reasons later)
Here is a piece of advice for those of you who have a list of similar length
Don’t start with the most important item
It would be as silly as going in alphabetical order
You never know what comes next
what’s waiting for you down the line
Don’t impose any order as long as it’s still in your head
Grab the first item that crosses your mind
hold it firmly and write it down
My first item is programming languages
I always thought programming appeals to me
However guilty I felt about it
It started as pleasure, it turned into work
Work can be pleasurable, I know
I do enjoy programming to a certain extent
Work means you do it after reaching your limit
your limit of capacity, your limit of joy
Some call it a professional attitude
consistency, grit
These are phrases with a better reputation but meaning all the same
You lost connection with the joyful aspect of what you do
It’s time to ask myself the clarifying question
what exactly interests me about programming
I’m certainly not interested in delivering a product or a feature to users
Happy users never made me happy
I don’t believe you can get happiness from any application
Even if you could, I’d choose another way to make you happy
Not that I don’t care about you or other people
Users are not people but an abstraction
Most programmers don’t give a damn about the user
They simply want to play the biggest game ever
and to get paid for that
Programming languages play a sizable role in programmers’ lives
in the lives of some of us. The rest don’t care
They don’t care for a number of reasons
The number one reason is they know only one
They usually know more, but superficially
They stick to the one they know best
It’s in high demand and it’s not very demanding
You learn it, and bang, you land a job
Java is here to stay until the end of the universe
just like C, its counterpart galaxy
Why take a risky road then?
Some don’t care because they look beyond the language
What is beyond?
What do they see?
We live in a post-babel world
one tiny tower here, one over there
One was built of Java bricks. The other: of Python stones
We stopped building a while ago
We lay planks instead to connect the towers
In other words, we integrate with APIs and services
whatever language they were written in
