I’m advocating for seeing the big picture. It’s not that I don’t care about programming, but I try to care for it in proportion to achieving impact, which I fee

I’m advocating for seeing the big picture. It’s not that I don’t care about programming, but I try to care for it in proportion to achieving impact, which I feel is the more important thing (most seniors and higher would agree). I did give Ruby an honest shot, the maturity of the ecosystem around numerical computation and machine learning (my field) is nowhere near Python’s. That is to say, it’s not that Ruby was bad, but that Python was so far ahead of everything else that to deviate from that would mean spending an inordinate amount of time reinventing the wheel. I’ve certain fallen into this trap in the past (which caused to me extend my graduate school tenure by a year because I wanted to use a niche language which was cool but ended up having to spend time working around corner cases, which were solved problems in more popular and meticulously maintained libraries in other languages). Sometimes going with the mainstream means you get a lot solutions for free and can focus on your problem. Programming language choice is partly aesthetic —- some languages are more elegant than others —- but if you want to be employed and want to create real impact in the world, it has to be tempered with hard nosed pragmatism as well. You’re paid to deliver solutions to problems, not to optimize your preferences. Sometimes you can do both, but when you can’t, solving the problem must take precedence.