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Alessandro Aiezza
Alessandro Aiezza

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The Coding Language you Write Affects your Personality

I just found out about my personality disorder a personality–related phenomenon.

On the road to learning Italian, it has always fascinated me that my personality does appear to change slightly when I'm speaking it. The change is subtle, but enough that I've started to notice the difference when talking with native speakers.
Here is an article to back up the credibility of this phenomenon: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/life-bilingual/201111/change-language-change-personality

As I have been learning Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android and backend services, I am starting to notice the same type of shift in the way I code. My "engineering personality" and my behaviors seem to change.

One example is I think I prioritize more of a "get'r'done" personality in Swift than I used to in Java. In Java, I tend to think much more about Test Driven Development.
Maybe because unit testing in Swift did not come as easily to me as it did in the JVM.

Another example is when I'm in Kotlin I am much more interested in wrapping even the simplest of my domain objects in a data class. No primitive data types are left unwrapped. An Integer has a purpose and a name, and I create a data class for it. In Java, I would do this too, but it was much more daunting and sometimes I would not take the time.
I wonder if that's because data classes are so much easier to write in Kotlin.

🇮🇹 In Italian, I feel so much more chill and well spoken. There are no phrasal verbs and there are no trailing prepositions allowed, so much speech feels so much more stable.

🇺🇸 In English, because it is my native language, I throw words around like a madman, sometimes trying to seem impressive and hoping that my sentence will end correctly.

🇮🇹 In Italian I need to think ahead of time and sometimes put my pronouns at the front of my sentence as opposed to at the end.

I'm wondering if any software polyglots have encountered this same phenomenon.

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