I can't agree more with the sentiments expressed by Bob Grommes in his recent post "What is a 'Real Developer'? [1]". This is one of those posts where I'd like to just quote the whole thing, but I especially like this bit:
To my way of thinking, a "real developer" is someone who consistently produces quality software systems that delight customers. "Real developers" do this in spite of whatever handicaps happen to exist in their world. They know that no technology, platform, API or software ecosystem is perfect, but they know how to leverage the strengths of what they are given to work with to produce excellent results. And if they don't know, they can admit it to themselves, and learn quickly.
I also like this from Bob's bio [2]:
I’ve been an independent software designer / developer for 24 years. In this business, that makes me a Really Old Fart. In the past I’ve done everything from Z-80 assembler to Visual FoxPro (in the early 90's I wrote two books on that product, and edited FoxTalk for a couple of years). These days I mostly concentrate on the .NET platform, architecting and building line-of-business applications, usually involving large databases.
Leave it to an old Xbase [3] guy to know what it's like to work in what some programmers who consider themselves to be more "elite" like to think of as a technology ghetto! I can relate.
After a childhood spent two versions of the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer, I started out hacking DOS and Clipper in my first IT job; after that I spent several years in the worlds of VB 4-6 and ASP (with a good measure of Oracle and Java thrown in), and since then have been using .NET. To make me even more unfashionable, I am the co-author of two editions of a VBScript book [4] (with a third edition in the works); few would consider VBScript a "cool" technology, but it is nonetheless a powerful and enduring (though not always elegant) one.
All this time, my primary job has been to design, build, and support business- and database-oriented solutions for clients who just want something to work. In the big picture, all this puts me squarely in the programming mainstream, but there's no getting around the fact that some people persist in seeing my world as less worthy of respect. I've learned to live with it, even embrace it, though early on in my programming career I was somewhat insecure about it.
(Just when I thought we had made some progress, an otherwise excellent article in a recent Dr. Dobb's Journal categorized Visual Basic as a "scripting language," despite the fact that there are at least four flavors of "Visual Basic," only one of which can be considered a scripting language. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen this kind of thing, and the Dr. Dobb's editors should know better. I don't mean to suggest that the author or publication has the kind of active condescension we've been discussing here, but this example does underline the impression that people who operate outside of the Microsoft development stack have that "Visual Basic" is some kind of toy.)
I'm adding "Bob on Development" to my RSS reader.
Dan