This 100x. I am sick and tired of developers in the industry trying to push their own preferences onto junior developers. I think many of us who have been in th

This 100x. I am sick and tired of developers in the industry trying to push their own preferences onto junior developers. I think many of us who have been in the industry for a while have witnessed this scenario happen in the workplace a few times in our careers. Programming languages are like opinions, everyone has them and everyone is always wrong. We all have to start somewhere, it shouldn't matter if you decide to choose PHP or the new flavour of the week trend language on the HN homepage. All that matters is getting your foot in the door, seeing the possibilities of a programming language and then moving up. I recall programming Visual Basic in high school, my first ever exposure to programming. Not many would consider Visual Basic great, but it was enough for me to get a taste of what is possible in programming and from there, I consumed tonnes of books on different aspects of programming. Through my own growing knowledge, I could see the limitations and downsides of various languages the more I kept learning. My first foray into web development was PHP and HTML. There is no other language in existence that can rile up a crowd of elitist programmers faster than PHP. But PHP was my gateway into languages like Python and Javascript (especially Javascript). The more I learned, the more I could see similarities between PHP and Javascript, and other languages like C++. It didn't matter I chose what is considered a bad language for web development, it taught me concepts that carried over to other languages, it taught me the basics of things like if statements, for loops and more. Fast forward to now, I have a firm grasp on HTML, CSS & Javascript, I know Ruby, I know Python, I know Objective C and have a skillset that allows me to pickup a new programming language non-objectively and play around with it, without passing judgement or casting an opinion. Because I was able to make my own decisions along the way and learn what I wanted to learn, not what someone else thought was best to learn, I have a varied toolset and I am better off for it. We will start somewhere, I think some of us more than others lose sight of that. We get clouded by our own judgement, everyone thinks their favourite language and framework is better than the competition.