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Been there. Started as an MS dev and learned a lot programming straight Win32 in C++. College bridged me into Unix, and OS X pulled me in full time. (I prefer U

Been there. Started as an MS dev and learned a lot programming straight Win32 in C++. College bridged me into Unix, and OS X pulled me in full time. (I prefer Unix now generally). Playing in other ecosystems is fun. You learn slightly different ways of thinking about things (process-centric v. thread-centric), and the toolchain experiences are vastly different. But it's just a stack. It's a really crappy thing to get passionate about, because it's just a set of transient APIs. It's here today, gone tomorrow. Instead, you should consider trying different programming paradigms entirely. Investing in skills themselves yields disproportionate returns that you can apply to whatever hip thing every insists you must use. The tech industry only moves fast if you're trying to learn every stack everyone's salivating about...which usually isn't that different from what's already being done.

jorgecastillo 12y ago
An open source stack is not just a stack it's also a community & to me personally it's a way of living. More importantly you can drive the destiny of that community & software. If as a developer you invest your time in open source you won't regret it. Your destiny is in your hands and not in the hands of some random engineering in a big corporation. The worst that could happen it that you end up having to take part in maintaining some piece of critical software to you but with a small community. That doesn't sound so bad, the worst that could happen with a proprietary stack (Visual Basic 6) it that the owner forces you to move to some new shiny thing.
- mattgreenrocks 12y ago
  Open source doesn't really change much here. I'm arguing against taking a stack-centric view, which you and the author are doing, just taking opposite sides (open source/MS). I'm arguing in favor of building up foundational knowledge that you can apply in any stack. This is the real essence of computation: decomposing problems, inventing abstractions, and composing those abstractions. These skills serve you in every stack you come into contact with. Why wouldn't you want to hone them? If you're good enough with these skills, then every new stack that comes along is relatively trivial to understand -- you can apply your foundational knowledge to easily understand what it is doing on your behalf.

jorgecastillo 12y ago

An open source stack is not just a stack it's also a community & to me personally it's a way of living. More importantly you can drive the destiny of that community & software. If as a developer you invest your time in open source you won't regret it. Your destiny is in your hands and not in the hands of some random engineering in a big corporation. The worst that could happen it that you end up having to take part in maintaining some piece of critical software to you but with a small community. That doesn't sound so bad, the worst that could happen with a proprietary stack (Visual Basic 6) it that the owner forces you to move to some new shiny thing.

mattgreenrocks 12y ago
Open source doesn't really change much here. I'm arguing against taking a stack-centric view, which you and the author are doing, just taking opposite sides (open source/MS). I'm arguing in favor of building up foundational knowledge that you can apply in any stack. This is the real essence of computation: decomposing problems, inventing abstractions, and composing those abstractions. These skills serve you in every stack you come into contact with. Why wouldn't you want to hone them? If you're good enough with these skills, then every new stack that comes along is relatively trivial to understand -- you can apply your foundational knowledge to easily understand what it is doing on your behalf.