Let’s be honest, jokes are normally funny because they are at somebody’s expense. Whether it’s about a mother-in-law, a profession or ‘an Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman’ – somebody is always on the end of it and nobody like to be made fun of.

Now, these jokes are all well and good as long and you are not the subject – that said I’m a Cornishman and I get some stick over that but in general it’s just banter and I personally don’t find it offensive or oppressive.

Some of this I do find over the top and some people will find offence in just about anything (including this blog post I expect) but I do understand that we are more enlightened and have more appreciation of how these jokes can have a serious impact on others and we need to be mindful of that. All that said, I saw a tweet yesterday which made me put my head in my hands;

So, we can’t make jokes about an inanimate technology now in case we offend the people who use it – sorry, but that’s just ridiculous and I wasn’t the only one to think so as one of the first replies seemed to mirror my own thoughts (which I followed it up with);

tweet replies

Now obviously Twitter wouldn’t be Twitter if a thread like this didn’t quickly degrade into name-calling and the like and this did indeed come to pass (although not by the Tweet author or the above reply) – but I’ll not dwell on that.

Many did seem to think as I do but many others were saying that it wasn’t right to make jokes about a technology because it will discourage others from using it;

more tweet replies

Really? @mazihe wouldn’t learn a technology because “some ignorant doofus” made a joke about it! Sorry but why should you care?

Lets get one thing straight here – HTML is what powers the web and while many of today’s development tools will abstract that away you will be a better developer if you know how the nuts and bolts hang together.

PHP is considered by many to be ‘old hat’ and I’m sure there are 100’s of jokes out there running it down. But this blog is running on WordPress (probably jokes about that too) which is written in PHP – and rendered out as HTML.

Not learning a technology because someone on Twitter made a joke about it is just bone-headed and frankly lazy! Take ownership of your own path!

Being a developer is not just about using the popular tools and languages. It’s about solving problems using the right tools for the job and do that you need to put the time in, do the leg work and make your own mind up as to what those tools are.

Let’s consider the Java programming language. There is a lot that is good about it but it has it’s problems – but that didn’t stop if from being used to power the most widely used Mobile platforms on the planet, Android, and numerous other systems that many people rely on every single day.

With that in mind, consider the following;

I had a problem which I solved with Java, now I have a ProblemFactory

and this one;

Why do Java developers wear glasses? Because they don’t C#

Now I’ve got nothing against Java or Java developers, hell I used to be one, but I find these funny – and I won’t apologise for that.

But would these jokes, made by an “ignorant doofus”, make you think twice about learning the language?

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