“I’ll write anything that makes sense for the specific case we’re considering”.“It depends, what language do you need me to write?”.“I can write X and Y, but I’m willing to learn another language if need be”.“I just started learning X, but I’m curious about Y”.So here are some suggestions to answer the question “What language do you write?” if you want to avoid defining yourself as a specialist: I dream of a world where programmers aren’t defined by the technologies and languages they use, but by their ability to adapt and ramp up quickly in an unfamiliar environment. Of course, this isn’t the case of every developer and a lot of wonderful people make an active effort to bridge the gaps. Sometimes, people get hurt (OK, mostly just feelings in the programming world). It results in a fragmented world where groups of people prefer to stay isolated rather than keeping an open-mind across cultures. If you think about programming languages as human races, the metaphor of racism applies. There is always a tech bro community that will reinforce these. Sometimes their reaction is one of disgust and contempt for languages they’re not familiar with. A lot of developers feel uncomfortable writing in a language they don’t know. The experience I built across such a variety of languages, frameworks, and platforms means that I’ve finally gotten over “fear of the unknown”. What actually matters is that I can figure things out with documentation, patience and the invaluable knowledge base of StackOverflow. But if someone told me tomorrow that I’d need to stop using them entirely and use another, I’d probably just say “OK, fine”. There are obviously languages where I’ll be more productive because of accumulated experience (probably JavaScript and Java). I also don’t have a strong preference between most languages. Hell, after six years at Google and even leading an Android team, my knowledge of the Android platform barely scratches the surface. The thing is, I’m not an expert at any of these languages or frameworks. Recently, I’ve been using TypeScript (a variant of JavaScript) and working with frameworks like Node.js, React and Vue.js. I also worked at Google for six years on Android apps written in Java. Meanwhile, I wrote frontend code in JavaScript. Then I made websites with PHP, Ruby (on Rails), Python (Django) and so on. It influenced the way I think tremendously, but I never used it professionally. The human kind, at meetups and tech talks. I’ve been doing a lot of networking lately.
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