Irony of language fondness

There is an irony about fondness of language in a programmer’s life. I am not very particular about any programming language, I can read and understand and code in quite a few of those. But, my affection is not same for every language I know, and there is the irony.

My favorite language is C++. It is one of the most powerful languages that we have in the industry. It is multi-paradigm and can be used to solve many, if not all, programming problems. Most importantly, to me, C++ sounds very sweet.

On the other hand, there is C#. It has a very strong affiliation with Microsoft and Windows platform and people are prejudiced about it. Nevertheless, it requires proprietary .Net framework to run on top of. Despite these, C# is an amazing language. Its creator had the opportunity to look back into a long history of many languages and decide very carefully from the experiences we had in last half century. So, C# ended up accommodating a plethora of language features, both in terms of capabilities and syntax. I am very fond of C#.

My current job requires me to program in Java. When, I was first introduced to Java when I was a sophomore I became very fond to it. But, then I learned about C# and C++’s wonders kept on unraveling to me. So, I distanced myself from Java, for more than four or five years, until my MS coursework required me into using it. Now, here is the irony! I started my new job here, in Long Island, and my day to day primary language is now Java. I kept rediscovering a lot of facts about Java, and I started to like it again. Specially, Java 8 brings a lot of things I’d like a high level programming language to have. I am learning new things everyday, and would keep learning about them.

So, the irony is, C++ is my favorite language, I admire C# and my primary language is turning out to be Java. Behold, that is not the end of it. I also have to know JavaScript and Python and PHP and happen to like all of them, more or less. And off course, all these languages have their own utilities.

In the end of the day, it occurs to me that, fondness of languages do not matter after all. Every languages have a lot of things to know about and I’d like to be fluent in at least one of them. I just don’t know which one it is going to be!