12/16/2025

Knowing the syntax of a language is not enough to be a “programmer,” let alone to be a good programmer. Being “idiomatic in language X” is less valuable and less important than high—quality in design. Knowing the abstruse details of “API Y” does not make you a better software developer; you can always look up the answer to that kind of question! The real skills—the things that really differentiate great programmers from poor programmers—are not language-specific or framework-specific. They lie elsewhere.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering