What is it about developers that cause battles to the death regarding the proper way to indent code or the best programming language?

Some developers feel a real need to spread their programming beliefs by the sword. Sort of like another time over a thousand years ago when people felt the belief to spread their ideas by the sword…

Are we crusaders again? Do we really need an example of the inane debates that developers spend countless hours arguing about. Let’s list a few shall we:

• VB vs C#
• .NET vs Java
• EMACs vs VI
• Mac vs PC
• Agile vs Waterfall
• ROR vs Django
• Tabs vs Spaces
• NHibernate vs Entity Framework
• MS Test vs NUnit

There’s something about the developer mindset that causes us to fight about these tools and methods. I think it may be the attention to detail or the perfectionism that’s hard-coded into a lot of great developers. We want to build the best systems and we want to feel like we using the best tools and methodologies!

But here’s the crazy thing. It really doesn’t matter what tools we use as long as we get the job done. While everyone’s complaining about using the perfect tool or methodology, I plan to focus on shipping code. That’s the metric of success that matters.

In fact, some of my favorite apps are written in the wackiest programming language or using no methodology at all. All I care is that it works and solves my problem. WordPress is written in PHP which we all know is a ghastly language from a purist perspective, but it sure is a great blogging engine. Recently, I just re-installed my beloved slickrun and noticed that it needs the delphi (!) library to work properly yet I’ve installed that program on every machine I’ve had over the past 5 years.

I once had a CIO capture this sentiment best when he told me:

I don’t care if you write it in Cobol as long as it comes in on-time and under budget!