Hey, this is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps! Now today, I just
want to say don't fall in love with your programming language.
Back at my first software development job when I was a junior developer, I was
learning the Microsoft Stack. So, I started off with VBA and then it was VB5
and VB6 and then ASP and a lot of the web stuff. And we had two different
teams at the investment bank that we were working on. Two different
development teams, we have the Microsoft team which was a bunch of us Microsoft
developers when we did all the the ASP applications. We had a Java team and
they did Java servlets, java servlets, JSP pages, everything like that. Now, the
developers and the Microsoft team, we all knew for a fact that Java was a terrible
language and it was a bunch of hippies with sandals and all that kind of stuff.
It was fine. You could do it. It was free, but it was - it was we knew
knew it was not a very good language. On the other side, the Java developers knew
that the Microsoft developers were just working with toys. It couldn't scale, they
used gooeys, they didn't know how to use a terminal, etc. We - we had these
opinions about the others and if somebody said something bad about our
language, we were offended by it. I can remember being offended by somebody
saying how ASP is a good language for a web app if you have like 10 users, but it
can't really scale to more and I remember being like, "What does he know? He doesn't
know this language. He hasn't been up at night at 10, 11 o'clock at
night, trying to fix something because you're dealing with all these
different issues, and learning the process of learning a new language." Can
be very difficult sometimes, I mean, you have quick wins where you learn really
great things and you have these low-level bugs or environmental issues
that you have to solve. And you're on Stack Overflow for hours trying to sort
these kind of things. We've all been there and we all take the languages that
we learn very, very seriously. I can remember having artists having arguments
with people about how PHP would kick ASPs ass in a fight. It's ridiculous things,
right? And throughout my career, it's always been the same. I can remember
talking bad about SharePoint to a SharePoint developer and he was saying,
it was like he's getting really upset with me like I've insulted them. And I
had to backtrack saying, "I'm sorry, it's just we have these opinions about
stuff." So, the reason I'm talking about this is a couple of months ago, I did a
video about the Ionic Framework, talking about how much I love the Ionic
Framework, but we weren't going to use it for any new projects because I was
concerned about the webview, and I was concerned about client projects going
forward. That's all I was talking about. I mean, it's got - that video
is probably the most popular video on this channel.
I don't know why. If you search for Ionic Framework it comes up first. If you
search for Ionic, it comes up like fourth. I don't know why YouTube put it there,
but it does. It's just my opinion going forward and I think iInic is a great
framework. If you have like 10 or 20 applications, it's great. But my
concern would be if there's a platform update or if they start rejecting
webview could apps, for whatever reason it was based on an article I read. It wasn't
something I just came up, I dreamed up. But anyway, there was all that. But that
video has had some of the nastiest comments I've had on any video people
saying things like "You suck!" (laughs) That's - that's pretty tame. But there's
some pretty nasty comments on there. And at first, I was getting like
really upset like, "Why are these people are insulted? What did I do? It was
just - and then - then I realized "Hey, I insulted them first. I'm the one who
said you know that the Ionic Framework was whatever." I think it's more
the title than anything else cuz I really I love the Ionic Framework. I
think it's very elegant. If you do PWAs, I mean, I would definitely go that
way. But I'm concerned about client applications going forward because we
have so much coming through and the last thing I want is for a platform
change, to have every client calling me up and saying, "What are we gonna do? How
are you gonna fix it?" That's my problem. And some people say that will never
happen and they may be true. That may be true. They may be. So anyway, but my
message today is when you start moving from being a developer working for
others, or even working for yourself and start looking at more the business side.
Like what is the most efficient language I can use? What is most efficient
technology we can use in terms of performance, but also in terms of cost? So
that would be things like how many developers are available who know this
language and so forth. You start thinking about that stuff. You start ro think about
what's the best language for this project going forward.
Truth is that most languages, the output is pretty much the same. When people say
what's better Java or Kotlin, the output is pretty much the same, whichever
you are more comfortable to as a developer, but you have to be willing to
learn. And when you're thinking about the business, I think about what is the best
technology going for - for this going forward. Sometimes, the best technology is
the one you know the best if you're the developer you're going to use. But I
think it's a bit silly and not - again, I'm the same in this that we identify so
closely with the languages that we learn. So, my message today and you let me know
if you disagree with me, is don't fall in love with the language that you learn.
The technology evolves all the time. You may have WAP skills learning, the
Wireless Application Protocol in the early days of mobile, that's no longer
relevant. I happen to hate PHP with a passion. I hate working with PHP, but PHP
is what Facebook is built on, so it's obviously not a bad language. Well, we all
have our opinions about these kind of thing. But if I've offended anybody
when I talk about a language or Ionic or whatever, that is not my intention and
let me just apologize now. So anyway, that is it for today. I will talk to you, guys,
again tomorrow!