Language Wars: At CodeMash we all get along great

In his blog on Language Wars Andrew talks about how languages are more alike than they are different.  This week I am at CodeMash which is a conference organized by developers and is aimed at bringing developers from the various language camps together.  One of the themes that has permeated the conference is that we all have something to learn from each other.  Each language was developed to solve a certain problem set in a manner that made sense to some set of developers.  Almost every language takes ideas and constructs from one or more other languages.  The key to becoming a good developer is to look at how other developers solve problems and then translating and using those some solutions to the problems set before you.  Almost every problem you face as a programmer has been solved by someone else.  Sometimes those solutions are in your language of choice, but more often than not the solution was in another language.  The key is being able to see the utility of the solution and how you can benefit.  You should not focus on the fact that the solution included a bunch of curly braces and semi-colons or the fact that it was written in some language only used by a couple thousand developers worldwide.

When you look at various languages as just one more method of expressing a solution to a common problem, then you can actually grow your own skills.  And who knows, maybe you will see that VB is a pretty powerful language even if you prefer C# or you will notice that the Ruby guys are doing some very interesting things.