Goose bumps.

I am preparing my talk for India's FP conf and ran across some quotes from Joe Armstrong passage. I read them avidly. Bear with me as I list a few of them. Tweaked slightly to fit the twitter format.

“The next programmer we hire must read all of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu.”’
“All seven volumes?”
“Yes.”
“Will it make them better at punctuation and make them get their quotes right?”
“Not necessarily, but it will make them a better programmer. It’s a Zen thing....”

Knowing a small amount about many languages is a useful skill. I often find that I need to understand a bit of Python or Ruby to solve a particular problem. The programs I download... are often written in a variety of languages and need a little tweaking before I can use them.

Each language has its own set of idioms, its strengths, and its weak- nesses. By learning several different programming languages, you will be able to see which language is best suited to the kinds of problems that interest you most.

A Zen master might tell you that to be better at mathematics you’d better study Latin. Thus it is with programming. To better understand the essence of OO programming, you should study logic or functional programming (FP). To be better at FP, you should study Assembler.

Today, not only can we read about the ideas, but we can try them in practice. This makes the difference between standing on the poolside wondering whether it would be nice to swim and diving in and enjoying the water.

This is of course from the foreword of "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks", but it could just as easily be about my new work, Programmer Passport from http://grox.io . The quote that gave me goose bumps and moved me to tears:

He covers not only the well-established languages such as Ruby but also...languages like Io. Ultimately, programming is about understanding, and understanding is about ideas. So, exposure to new ideas is essential to a deeper understanding of what programming is all about.

RIP, Joe. Thanks for a gift I can now never repay. I love you, man.