Codemonkey on my back

I have a love/hate relationship with my programming background. I love that I can think of something, and then make it. That's what lured me into the game in the first place -- when I was a kid I wrote a little school adventure sim, and felt the godlike power of making virtual people do what I wanted them to do.

However, with the joy of creation comes the painful treadmill of learning new languages. (Although I'd imagine true coders enjoy this).

I can list what I've learned chronogically, Basic, Assembly, C, C++, Java, Perl, ASP, PHP, Python -- that's not even counting my CS courses -- and it looks now like I have to learn Rails and Ruby On Rails.

I've been keeping my head in the sand. Saying 'nyah nyah nyah' to block out the noise. But I can't ignore it anymore, this Ruby On Rails thing isn't going away. And I'm beginning to think that I build my next project on anything else at my own peril. But the kicker was seeing how quickly services like YubNub have popped up by using Ruby On Rails.

So that's the curse. I can't just settle into a familiar language and use it until I'm old and grey. It's like if you speak English and start to notice that more and more people around you are speaking Spanish -- eventually you'll have to give in if you want to get things done.