The Book of Five Rings

I’ve recently been reading The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. It has a lot of valuable insight in it and I wanted to share a few of my favorite quotes:

“Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken…Be neither insufficiently spirited nor over spirited.”

“You should not have a favorite weapon. To become over-familiar with one weapon is as much as fault as not knowing it sufficiently…It is bad for commanders and troopers to have likes and dislikes.”

I think the second quote is especially relevant for programming. While I think it’s great to have in-depth knowledge of one language, I think it’s even better to be familiar with a wide variety of languages. This allows you to be agile, and to choose the language that best fits the project instead of the language that you’re most comfortable with.