Josh Sherman
I hope you’re really fucking pissed right now. I hope you go thermonuclear on the comments box. Why? Because it really just proves how right I am about how stupid you are. You let some silly blog post get under your skin.
Thing is, I really didn’t know what to call this post so I figured I’d just shoot for the moon and go for something that is just trashy clickbait.
The real point of this post isn’t to make you feel inadequate, but to make a proclamation about my current station in life in regard to being a developer. After around 7 months of being a full-time JavaScript developer, I finally shook PHP as my “go-to” language.
I was faced with something recently where I needed to knock out a quick script to process the data and I didn’t reach for PHP. It was a great feeling because up until that point, I would usually just fall back to PHP because I knew I could knock it out faster. Now JavaScript & Node.js are what I reach for.
I am, at least for the moment, a Node.js developer.
What’s really interesting is that I’ve had at least a few job opportunities cross my desk where they were offering to take dirty PHP, Ruby and Python developers and give them the opportunity to be trained up become Node.js developers. I don’t remember a time when that was the case for any other language. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention.
To my PHP brethren and sistren that may still be fuming over the title of this post, take a moment to think about why you’re upset. I know I was starting to really doubt myself after slumming it in PHP-land for well over ten years. Did I spend too much time with one language? Am I behind the curve because of it? Don’t even get me started on continually being the butt of all of your developer friend’s jokes. Shit gets old, for sure.
The truth is, the language doesn’t make the developer. Good developers can adapt and transcend the language itself. Understanding concepts, an ability to execute and real-world experience, especially at scale, are significantly more important than the syntax itself.
For me, hopping to a new language has been a great experience. It makes things exciting again. It’s provided me with an opportunity to learn. I never want to lose the hacker aesthetic of pursuing knowledge. I’m not saying I knew everything about PHP but at a certain point you run out of challenges and that leads to boredom which eventually leads to malaise.
If the language you’re using right now still captivates you, that’s all that matters. But if it’s not, you can blame yourself for not fixing the glitch.
