Arpit Gupta

Okay, I'm in a bit of a sentimental mood (it's those Sunday evenings, man), but here's one thing that I keep thinking about: I wish we all would respond to the loss that some programmers feel right now with a bit more grace. Some reactions can come across as "it's always been about shipping, dummy" or "huh-duh it's never been about the code, always the results". And that feels a bit deaf, doesn't it? I mean, let's be honest, for many of us it's been about more than that. Lots of programmers — myself included! — feel a great amount of joy when they see (or even better: write) the perfect line of code, where abstraction and syntax and semantics meet and hug and everything comes together. We travelled to meetups and conferences and had hour long conversations with strangers about favorite styles of writing code, about keyboards, colorschemes, keybindings, syntactic flourishes, ways to comment code, cherished parts of standard libs, beautiful ways to rewrite a function that we've all written. I know a guy who said he makes life decisions based on whether he gets to work with a certain programming language more or less. Digesting the fact that things are changing and that some things we cherished might be replaced by other things — that takes a different amount of time for different people.