I was sixteen when I first read The Pragmatic Programmer. Back then, my programming career was in its very early stages—crude websites, silly games, and even sillier quizzes. The code I wrote was a shoddy, incomprehensible mess (for a long while, I preferred creating a single massive file, instead of modularizing the code in some way). I had only begun to learn that the job of a software developer goes beyond just making it work, that you’re writing code not for machines but humans, and a quote from The Pragmatic Programmer had a catalytic effect on me in that regard:

India has dozens of languages and countless dialects, and English serves as a necessary tool to bridge the linguistic gap. No matter where you go, you can expect at least someone around who can understand and speak it reasonably well.

What if messy code could be fun, not frustrating?

In 2004, Paul Graham wrote an essay on the perks of picking a less-popular language.

Some quotes are clever; some only superficially so. Often, we are so awed by a statement that we don’t ever question its veracity. Take, Betteridge’s law of headlines, for example. The maxim assets that every headline ending with a question mark can be answered with a “no.” A straightforward analysis points that the law only applies 25% of the times. Probably, the originator didn’t consider genuine uses of having a question as a headline.