There’s an excellent SDET whom I worked with around a year ago who shares many of my software interests (Lean/Agile/TDD/Design Patterns, etc.) as well as some some non-software interests (photography, left-handedness). Even though we haven’t been on the same project for a while, we sometimes get together to have design discussions. We’ve found it helpful for both of us to have an audience who is outside our immediate projects to give us honest feedback. His test code is better than most people’s production code, and my production code is getting more and more testable.
Anyway, after one of these discussions, I mentioned that I was working with Spring, something that the development group uses extensively for Java projects, not as much with the C# projects.
“What, you’re working with Java now?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m becoming bilingual.” I said.
“That’s not bilingual, that’s ecumenical!”
He has a point, many people have such a religious zeal around their choice of technology that it clouds their vision. Personally, I think that learning Java has done a lot to make me a better C# developer because the contrast stands out and I think to myself “why are things this way in this language?” and “wow, anonymous classes are pretty handy for endo-testing” and “while I miss the get/set property accessor syntax, I see and understand why Java folks don’t like it.”
