Title: More Than One

Author: Martin Moene

Date: 09 May 2016 08:52:26 +01:00 or Mon, 09 May 2016 08:52:26 +01:00

Summary: 

Body: 

As I write this, I’ve not long returned home from the ACCU Conference. If you were there, I hope you had a productive and fun time of it. As ever, it’s been a full-steam-ahead schedule of fascinating talks, interesting people and insufficient sleep, not to mention the annual agonising over which talks to miss and which to attend.

There is often a recurring theme at the conference, and this year was no exception. I don’t think anyone who attended would disagree that the theme was ‘diversity’. The human diversity issues raised, however, are mirrored in technological diversity: to accept and embrace many different forms. The ACCU conference is often a rich environment for raising awareness of new and exciting technologies, finding new and exciting ways of using existing technologies and attempting to shine a light on the modern with insights from classic techniques.

There were talks specifically about using multiple languages to achieve the same, or similar, goals. It’s a fairly well-known tip from The Pragmatic Programmers and others that learning new programming languages informs our understanding of the languages we already know, whilst simultaneously broadening our perspectives on different styles, techniques and technologies. This is valuable because it can help prevent us from becoming stagnant in our views and philosophy.

I’m aware that I risk extending the metaphor too far by making the comparison with human diversity and acceptance; however, there are parallels that are worth considering. We pride ourselves as technologists in welcoming and accepting technological change for the positives it brings to us. We should not ignore human diversity for much the same reasons – it enriches our world and our outlook.

Notes: 

More fields may be available via dynamicdata ..