Do you ever feel like you have been going forward only to suddenly see the back of your own head from the past?
That has been happening to me recently. There are a slew of very cool technologies that I am keen to be playing with at the moment. I have a new little app that I am building, and do I take this chance to play more with:
- ErlyWeb and Erlang
- Django and Python
- Jaxer and JavaScript
- Lift and Scala
- Grails and Groovy
- Merb and Ruby
Or do I stick to my old favourites?
There are definite advantages to trying out the new thing. By learning something new, I always take something back with me to the old. I can also better understand a slightly different world, which is important to me, and my role.
On the other hand, what if I hadn’t always kept up to date. What if I had stayed with the framework that I built in CGI land in Perl. I knew that puppy inside and out. I was constantly adding needed features a la Basecamp » Rails). Sure, there were no books, and I couldn’t hire others that knew the framework already, but man I was fast with it… and if I kept at it for the last 10 years who knows what it would be? Maybe by now I would have build a mind reader DSL?
Would that have actually have been a worse approach? On each new project I wouldn’t have to learn a thing. But, maybe the code would have kept growing and become a legacy ball of mess.
When you jump to something new you get to do spring cleaning. You don’t bring all of the baggage with you, and you hopefully learn the few things that you want to bring along.
This fits in with IDEs too. As you see people jump around to the latest and greatest, would they be better off if they just stuck with emacs and customized the hell out of it? I took huge pride in my .emacs and corresponding .el files. Emacs was at one with me :)
As I jump on a flight to London, I think I will go for something new though, as it will keep me from boredom enough to actually do something on the flight. Sometimes you need something new just to feel alive.
