The Duckling phenomenon

An old adage says that the first thing a Duckling sees after being hatched from an Egg becomes the Mother, the analogy has never been more truer than when it is used to describe Programmers/coders. All programmers and other script-writing fellows are normal beings that normally follow the path (image) of their creators, the first language a programmer learns become the basis of argument and language of choice and consequently becomes the language to which they would fight to defend to the bitter end. Few characters have been able to escape this silly situation.

The big fight as far as programming is concerned can be summarized as a fight between two kinds of people. People who love to use BASIC-like languages vs. the Rest who love delimiting their lines with semicolons and using curly braces all over. The latter loves to bash the poor former and in day gone by “Dim x As Integer” loving coder/programmers/scripters were regarded as Para-Programmers who seemed to know nothing and had nothing to offer to the development environment. Fiery quips of “VB6 provides a better GUI development environment” were quickly pacified by the then quite effective “If VB (6) is so great, why doesn’t Microsoft use it?” and most definitely they (me included) didn’t have an answer to it. Arguments of Memory Access (like anyone used it anyway) were additional armory in the Arsenal of the Pro-semicolon faction. As they years passed so the argument evolve and with the evolution (re-writing) of VB6 to VB.NET and finally we had something in common - the CLR that made “Us Equal and Had No” equal (sorry Java Folks). Thus the argument changed form to “VB.NET can do anything C# can do.” This has been going on for a while and is kinda tiresome. So this is what I say, if you only know one language, you are crippling yourself. The world is out there, the weekend is ripe, fire up a new IDE and jot down a few lines of a not so friendly language –you might actually like it.

By the way what happened to “Managed C++”? No one seems to be defending it so much!