General

Have you ever asked yourself what are the benefits of diversity? Is it really useful? For many years, I believed that those articles we read about diversity are just nice words and opinions that lack concrete evidence.

Four years ago, I attended a conference entitled “Organization of Programming Languages”, and at the end of the conference I asked the lecturer, “Why are there so many programming languages? Why don’t we combine some languages to make things much easier for programmers?” He answered my question by telling me that some famous IT companies tried this, and after years of hard work they failed and decided to stop because they found out that the results could not be developed and would produce very complicated languages. They realized that each programming language has its own characteristics, and this diversity is the strength that increases programmers’ creativity and productivity. Based on this conclusion, they created platforms to group some of the languages in a way that they can work together without trying to merge them. This means that multiple languages can be used in one project, and the results were remarkable because this time they took advantage of diversity rather than trying to eliminate it. His answer inspired me because it has deeper meaning than it appears.

Certainly, this example doesn’t only apply to programming languages. People from different cultures and environments have different experiences, habits, and characteristics. When all of these differences are shared together in one society, definitely, this will lead to more creativity, innovation and productivity, and this is the desired goal for a country like Canada. Now I fully understand why Canadians are very proud of their multicultural country and diverse society.