Programming languages: advantages of both specialization and being a generalist

In the 1970s, I very much enjoyed working through Jean Sammet's classic book "PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES: History and Fundamentals". For one thing, it was my first real exposure to Lisp, and it was fun learning many new languages at once. At one point I had over a dozen programming languages on my resume (due to needing to use some one-off languages for military hardware, and several different assembler languages).

Generalization is good because the more experience with different languages, libraries, frameworks, and development styles that you have, then the easier it is to choose a good technology to solve new problems. I would argue that broad experience is at least a little better than narrow but deep experience.

Unfortunately there is another side to this issue: whenever I see really great design and code, it almost always seems to be written by someone who deeply specializes in one, or perhaps two, programming languages.

In the last few years, due to customer requirements, I have had to work in Java, Common Lisp, Ruby, and Python (and a little work with Prolog, and even less fortunately in C++). I am now in my mid-50s, and semi-retired (I try to limit myself to working no more than 25 hours per week). I would like to specialize in just one or two languages and not have the overhead of staying current with a half dozen programming languages.

The language that I enjoy the most is Ruby, and with the maturation of JRuby, it is great to be able to use the same language for scripting and general software development (using Matz's C based Ruby) and when I need to use existing Java libraries and frameworks (JRuby). While I really enjoy Lisp and Smalltalk (never professionally), my hope is that as JRuby continues to get faster and integration with the Java platform improves that the combination of (C or J)Ruby and Java will cover everything that I need for my work. BTW, the comment about future work on a "compiler that allows compiling a given Ruby class 1:1 to a Java class, producing a class you can construct, with specific signatures you can call from Java code" posted by Charles Nutter a few days ago to my JRuby blog article was very good news indeed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more