A Kind of Programmer
I got into programming with PHP. It was an easy way to get started and proved to be a valuable tool for a very long time. In school, it was a no brainer to knock out projects with a few bits of PHP and gladly take the A. Although, for whatever reason, I ended up getting more interested in other languages. My interest in programming partly was fueled by an interest in open source communities such as Gnome and Linux. This got me interested in C# and Mono, and to some extent, Python. As I moved forward in learning these other languages, my opinion of PHP fell radically. It started to become ugly and archaic. Eventually, PHP seemed like a dirty and uninteresting tool.
Now that I'm a bit older, I realize that my opinions were immaturity. There is nothing wrong with PHP and there are many great examples of how it is used effectively and elegantly. Yet, even though I recognize this silly reluctance to enjoy a practical language, there is still a part of me that glamorizes more complicated systems. At times I idolize those developers that have to wrangle memory into place and construct interesting data structures to improve I/O and caching. In my mind these are the people that create the basic environment that all other programmers must work under, which must mean they are an extremely intelligent and elite group of people.
I'm not for a second going to diminish what these excellent programmers do. But, I am going to stop believing it is something out of the ordinary. When I was young, my view of PHP was partly attributed to my desire to be one of these influential hackers who seemed to write the code that other coders would use. People who wrote databases, kernels, and servers seemed like their influence was spread far and wide among people who had to get things done. In a way, my attitude was that writing code for people was not as cool or interesting as writing code that enabled more code. Obviously, this is one of the lamest ideas ever.
While I still have dreams of being associated with the elite group of people who manage to write amazing databases and highly distributed server systems, the reality is I'm just not that kind of programmer. I've been doing a lot of work with Javascript and it has made me realize that it is a problem space that fits me rather well. Up until this point, I don't know that I would have wanted to admit that, but the reality is reality. I wouldn't say I'm a "front end" coder as I would associate that more with having an eye for design. But at this point in my programming career I'm happy to admit I've finally begun to really appreciate writing applications for end users.
I'm sure there are still tons of interesting lower level applications that I'll dream of writing, but for the time being I'm going to stick with thinking about end users. I missed an opportunity when I first started programming to appreciate people using my code because I wanted those people using it to be other programmers. That shouldn't happen again. I'm hoping this kind of attitude will not only help me improve my code, also help improve the lives of those using my code.
