Over twenty years ago, I moved from Oregon to Utah to start going to school at BYU. As we were driving to Provo from the north, my mom, who had been born in Utah, commented, "This place right here is called the point of the mountain."

"That's stupid, there's nothing here!" I remember saying, a bit more harshly than was appropriate. I think my mom was a little taken aback, and didn't bother to try to justify why the place deserved to have a name: It separates Utah valley from the Salt Lake Valley, and the counties with corresponding names; it's the highest point on I-15 through the Wasatch Front and the place you'll most likely hit snowy roads.

I realized later that I was just experiencing culture shock. After an email discussion with a coworker today, I realized that culture shock is possible between programming environments.

My coworker was announcing that he was going to create a new class for working with file paths, because the .NET classes FileInfo and DirectoryInfo were unintuitive, awkward and poorly conceived. Among his concerns was that it seemed stupid that FileInfo.Exists on a path returns false even if there is a directory there. You have to use DirectoryInfo.Exists to know if there is a directory at a particular location. He had a couple of other complaints as well, but I want to focus on this one.

My coworker is a proficient Java programmer, and if you look at the .NET Framework design decision to have both FileInfo and DirectoryInfo from the perspective of someone coming from java.io.File, you can understand his discomfort.

At the same time, I can imagine a .NET programmer deciding that java.io.File is messed up. Where's the logic behind File.isAFile()? That's like Apple.isAnApple(). And isn't it really awkward that in order to know if a file (and not a directory) exists, I have to use both File.exists() and File.isAFile()? Ah for the simplicity of FileInfo.Exists!

I began to think that his complaints in this respect were more a matter of Java to .NET culture shock -- it's not what he expects, so .NET is wrong. That's not to say that I'm dismissing his concern by giving it a label, but I'm noticing that it is an important thing to be aware of as you become familiar with a new environment. It's really easy to flip the bozo bit when you see something new that you don't immediately understand. And I think it is a mistake to reject the idioms and patterns of a programming environment because they're not like back home.

For a sort of ridiculous example, consider an English speaker learning German. Compared to German, English is a fairly genderless language. Don't the Germans understand, though, that getting rid of gender would be so much more efficient? Instead of having to remember nouns and their gender, I can just remember the noun itself. Therefore, when I speak german, I'm just going to say "the" instead of the pointlessly complex "der", "die" and "das".

I also realize that I'm currently suffering from reverse culture shock. I used to write a lot of Java code myself, and absolutely loved JetBrains IntelliJ. I was thrilled with the discovery of each well-crafted feature. It was agonizing to have to go back to Visual Studio in order to write some native code.

But then I had to spend more and more of my time doing native development. Visual Studio 2005 came out and life started getting better (hallelujah! I can do a "rename" refactoring!). If I ever had occasion to get back into the Java code to look at something, I'd double-click the IntelliJ icon and then get out a magazine. Five minutes later the application and project would finally be loaded and ready to work with. And good grief, look at the memory footprint of that thing.

Java? IntelliJ? Eh.

But I do think "point of the mountain" is just as natural as can be now.