Zealotry
David Heinemeier Hansson, primary creator of Ruby on Rails, is talking directly to me1:
I would have a hard time imagining hiring a programmer who was still on Windows for 37signals… If you have any desire working for the rising rank of companies building their business on open source technologies, you don’t want to carry a liability like that around on you resume. Being labeled a 2005 Switcher is bad enough.
“Hello, my name is David and I am a 2005 switcher.”
One reason I didn’t want to switch to Macs in the first place was the smug elitism associated with that particular brand. Great design married with great functionality is meritorious; zealotry and intolerance should be despised. I use the best tool suited for the particular job: the proportion of application development jobs open for Windows versus those for the Macintosh made the choice of development platform very logical. As we reach the point where web applications and SOAs move to the forefront while particular OS matters less then, again, the choice is very logical.
I don’t, like, hate the guy now. Just nitpicking. ( =
On to other nits… Joel Spolsky is espousing the virtues of Hungarian notation in this most recent post. I gotta say that, until now, I’ve only seen Hungarian notation used as an somewhat useless adjunct to the already functioning type system of my compiler. Moving to a weakly typed language Ruby made me even more predisposed to not use Hungarian notation. Joel’s point about using Hungarian notation to markup the semantics of the variable is interesting and bears further thought. So all those anti-Hungarian zealots (I used to be one until about five minutes ago) should start thinking about that too.
To all this zealotry I would say this: at least your favorite programming language isn’t Brainfuck.
1 Okay, not really directly to me. He doesn’t know me. Metaphorical-like.