Yeah, Real Developers program in C or Assembler and the rest are pretenders. Variations on what 'Real Developers' do have been around as long as there have been developers, I suppose. Bob Grommes* writes on the topic of "What is a Real Developer?" on his blog, "Bob on Development" and he has a different definition of what Real Developers do:
To my way of thinking, a “real developer” is someone who consistently produces quality software systems that delight customers. “Real developers” do this in spite of whatever handicaps happen to exist in their world. They know that no technology, platform, API or software ecosystem is perfect, but they know how to leverage the strengths of what they are given to work with to produce excellent results. And if they don’t know, they can admit it to themselves, and learn quickly.
Right on, Bob. In the real world, you don't always get to choose the language, version, platform, etc. For example, my co-dev Jason came into our project as a C# 2.0 guy but had to adapt to the VB.NET 1.1 world that our project lived in. He adapted well and I think the exercise of dealing with a different set of tools was probably good for him. And I think that situation is more common than the situation where you get to choose your poison, unless you're developing your own products for sale. If you're working with clients, you're going to be constrained by their realities. Speaking of realities we wouldn't choose, he's now working on a project involving ASP classic and I've got one coming up. Yikes.
Oh, and here's a steal from one of the comments to Bob's post:
If I could wrap everything you just wrote into a slogan it would be something like: “Real Developers Don’t Bitch. They Code” -- John K
* apologies to Bob Grommes for mis-identifying him as Bob Lewis and apologies to Bob Lewis to mis-attributing the post and blog to him.
Hm, that's the second time I've been mistaken for Bob Lewis. I guess I'm going to have to take him off my blogroll! I'm actually Bob Grommes. But thanks for the link!
--Bob (Grommes)
Posted by: Bob Grommes on April 18, 2007 03:16 PMI agree with the sentiment of your post, but not what I read as the sentiment of the post you linked to. I read your summary as a complaint about language elitism and that in the real world you don't always pick the language you use. Which is both true and noteworthy.
However I read the linked post as a defense of the flawed implementation model for Microsoft's web technology development platform. To help their application developer base migrate to web development, MS abstracted away the (important) differences between web development and application development.
By hiding these differences between layers of abstraction MS has done their developer base an incredible disservice by confusing the model. It's more difficult to understand because the abstraction is working on a fundamentally different model than what the developer is creating.
This is not to say that a ASP.NET developer is incapable of being a good or talented coder. But without the fundamental understanding of how the web works, it's no wonder that the interesting technological advances in web developments have happened on non-MS platforms. Er, but I suppose that's far beside the point. ;-)
Posted by: ryan on April 18, 2007 10:56 PMBob GROMMES, sorry man. I was looking for a name and I knew you were Bob so I jumped on the first likely candidate. I feel terrible about it, not just because it sucks to be mis-identified but because I try to stay true to my journalistic background and I blew it in this case. I'm going to edit the post.
Posted by: buggy on April 27, 2007 07:24 PMRyan,
Gosh, you wouldn't have any biases to expose here, would you? ;-)
But, seriously, I read the post by Bob Grommes and some of the comments and it made me think. That tangent of my thinking is what I wrote about. Obviously, I plucked a very specific piece of what he wrote and examined my feelings about that. I didn't (intentionally) write a review of the whole post. However, as always, your thoughtful comments are always welcome... did you find it worthwhile to read the post I linked to?
Posted by: buggy on April 27, 2007 07:31 PM