Don't Stick to Your Own Discipline

Every field has its champions and superheroes: the people with tens of thousands of followers, whose blog posts are always read and quoted and who speak at all the conferences. People look to these champions to analyze and direct the way their community works. Often, the leaders in one field will be contrasted with "them," the leaders in a different field: that iPhone programmer is one of "us," and the Android programmer giving a talk in the other room is talking to "them."

This definition of "us" and "them" is meaningless. It needs to be, in order to remain fluid enough that a new "them" can always be found. Looking through my little corner of history, I can see a few distinctions that have come and gone over time: Cocoa versus Carbon; CodeWarrior versus Project Builder; Mach-O versus CFM; iPhone versus Android; Windows versus Mac; UNIX versus VMS; BSD versus System V; SuSE versus Red Hat...