My little theory is that the concept of “imprinting” in psychology can just as easily be applied to programming: Much as a baby goose decides that the first moving life-form it encounters is its parent, embryonic programmers form ineradicable attachments to the patterns and quiddities of their first formative language. Machine Readable

A regular column about programming. Because if/when the machines take over, we should at least speak their language.

For many people, that language is Ruby. It’s often credited with making programming “click”; imprintees speak of it with a certain indebtedness and affection. I get that. I wrote my first “Hello world” in an awful thing called Java, but programming only began to feel intuitive when I learned JavaScript (I know, I know) and OCaml—both of

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