Don't Be An Arrogant Language Purist.

The world of software development today is very different than what it was when we started programming. Back in those days if you asked a question like this one the so called Java experts would grill you, nail you and crucify you publicly on the forum. Those were the days of the purist.

Then; Microsoft happened.

Languages like GW Basic allowed the existence of the hobbyist programmers who would then move on to more serious languages like C / C++ master those and move on to MFC or Win32 API on VC++.

That; or these programmers would pick simpler and much more productive languages like Visual Basic.

Both paths that would later converge to a .NET language which would hugely just be a matter of preference, C# or Visual Basic.NET. Back then however most purist found it inconvincible that any business worth their salt would run a Microsoft Stack on their production servers. 

The purist of course; were wrong.

When you're a geek grinning at how stupid Visual Basic is or passing comments like "Oh but Ruby on Rails doesn't scale!" or when you are busy reminding someone on a forum how stupid his question was, what you often forget is that the survival and the success of languages (both human and programming) depends on the adaption they receive. It is eventually the community behind a language that builds or breaks a language. Something that a huge part of the Java community completely missed out on in the old days.

The Java community and the other communities of purists decided to keep the bar of entry high and look down on all who were not born with an out-of-the-box IQ that met their standards of intelligence.

The hobbyist programmers in those days were pretty much expected to forego their self respects and keep getting booted from forum to forum before they found the answers to the simplest of questions that someone could have helped them in ten minutes or they were expected to move to a simpler language with a vibrant community of similar hobbyist programmers where no question was stupid.

Back in those languages like Visual Basic which were easy to learn, easy to pick up, fun to work on and fairly productive created a whole community of hobbyist programmers who were smart, passionate about their art and were willing to go that extra mile to build successful applications. Yes these languages may have been responsible for creating programmers who cannot program but they also created passionate communities of programmers who would make big and small dents in the world of software development. What these programmers lacked in talent they made up in intensity.

Needless to say that these programmers and communities reciprocated back. As of now, the Microsoft developer communities are by far the richest, strongest, loudest and most fun loving communities out there.

Languages that evolve survive. While the purists were busy grinning about the fact that Microsoft was copying ideas from Java, the java language, which was hardly changing in years except for introduction of new API's in their JDK (there were hardly any changes to the core of the language itself), was running out of ideas to copy from. Microsoft of course was moving over to languages like Ruby to introduce ideas like Closures and Lambda expression right into the core of their own languages.

The idea was simple: keep your languages simple and do everything you could for your developer communities and to make their lives productive. In the process, if the purist shouted, bitched and whined, so be it.

This is not a Java Vs. C# blog post and I have no intentions of starting a never ending discussion controlled by Zealotry here but if you are a programmer one important lesson to take away from this rift is that you have a responsibility towards the language of choice that you use to make a living. Remember, the success (or even the existence) of the language you use in the long run depends on the community of programmers that program in it. And you are a part of that community. So go on and talk passionately about the language of your choice; make you tube videos on new features; blog about new tools around your development platform.

Stop being the anal purist who has no respect for starters. Stop giving us that stupid grins about how Linux is more reliable than windows; how Java is faster than C#; or how J2EE scales better than RoR because thanks to the ignorance and the arrogance of the purists, none of those statements are remotely true in most real life scenarios anymore.

The purists are dead. Long live the purists. Just don't end up being one of them.

Move over to a pragmatic side, try your level best to learn and respect all languages and when you see someone trying hard but asking questions which seem way too simple or even slightly stupid to you, treat the person with empathy.

That would be the biggest favor you as a developer would be extending to your developer community and the platform that you work on. The days of the technology purist are over so try practicing a little bit of humility the next time you are in a forum answering questions.