I've been grading programs all weekend long and just noticed a very interesting trend. It takes me longer to grade programs written in Java; the other programs are written in C or C++.
I consider myself to be fluent in the Java Programming Language, a bit rusty but more or less fluent. I never voluntarily program in Java any more, only in C++. They aren't terribly different languages though, so there must be something else to it.
My theory is this: programmers who prefer Java, i.e. those who wrote this program in Java, think differently. It is the same kind of differentiators that determine operating system preference. I feel the thought-process plays a large role in what we find comfortable as users; one reason I never felt comfortable using Windows was because nothing was intuitive for me, Mac OS is comfortable because everything is intuitive for me. I'm speculating that the same is true of programming languages. This isn't a wildly new revelation, I would have speculated this based on my own experiences learning various programming languages, but this is my first experience observing a range of programmers tackling the same problem. Even the simplest tasks yield wildly varying results, it is simply amazing.
The question I have now is which sphere holds the greatest influence? Does programming language choice influence the programming thought-process more? or does the thought-process influence programming language preference more?
