Software Stereotypes

I don’t generally believe in stereotypes. But occasionally they do seem to be true, in a general sense.

I’ve been an internet software developer for nearly ten years. In those years I’ve worked in various areas of web-development and have noticed certain attitudes that seem to be common amongst certain technology “camps”. For example:

Java people generally over-complicate things. They come up with the most convoluted “solution” to any given problem and call it scalable. Which, by the way, is strictly speculation. Plus, they really go overboard with configuration files. I’ve seen configuration files for configuration files, how silly is that?

Microsoft people not only drink the M$ kool-aid, they like it. They are usually rather weak at OO stuff. And rarely know anything about Design Patterns (which isn’t entirely bad).

Then there are the XML zealots—which are similar to Java people. But they aren’t limited to Java, they exist everywhere, in every technology camp. Words cannot describe these people. The seem to think XML is the solution for everything. I mean everything. I actually saw one guy post that XSLT was the only language he’d ever use again. He claimed it was a full-fledged language that was comparable to C++.

Delusion simply isn’t a strong enough word.

There are other wacky tech “camps” out there, to be sure. But I’ve not really been exposed to them (thank god). So I can’t really say what they’re typically like.

What “camp” am I a part of? Well, frankly, none of them. I’m really a bit of a technology agnostic. They all do the same thing, more or less. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. That having been said, I’m becoming more and more drawn to dynamic languages like Python. Ruby is on my list of things to play with. Primarily because I want to play with Ruby on Rails.

Anyway, I thought I’d just piss off all of my friends at once. o_O

Of which camp are you?