Programming languages are strangely seductive: each new one always seems a little (or a lot) better than the one before. In concluding his commentary "7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails" (22 Sep 2007) Derek Sivers suggests a reason:

#7 - PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE *YOU* ARE BETTER

Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it's "do exactly as I say" paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines.

I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby.

But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he's a better programmer now! You look back at your old ugly PHP code, compared to your new beautiful Ruby code, and think, "God that PHP is ugly!" But don't forget you wrote that PHP years ago and are unfairly discriminating against it now.

It's not the language (entirely). It's you, dude. You're better now. Give yourself some credit.

And maybe it doesn't just apply to programming languages (or girlfriends!) ...

(cf. PersonalProgrammingHistory (2 Apr 2002), NetfreeProgramming (21 Oct 2003), HigherLevelLanguage (17 Aug 2007), DoLess (24 Aug 2007), ...)

TopicProgramming - TopicLanguage - TopicHumor - 2007-10-05

(correlates: Comments on Suboptimism, SelfImprovement, Languages for Smart People, ...)