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This morning, I republished the post The 3 types of developers you will find in Africa by Richard Ngamita. He compared the software developer community to three controversial African leaders, Charles Taylor, Robert Mugabe, and Idi Amin, using satire to point out the different styles of programmers and their stereotypical behaviors.

When I first read the post, I though it daring to use such leaders to categorize the technology community, but then I started reading the comments - now 60+ and counting - and I found that every single commenter saw humor in the post and many voluntarily identified with one of the figures.

This made me question myself: Why did I find this post so "daring" yet the commenters not? Was it because as an American, I see these leaders through the context of the ex-colonials who lost so much under their rule? Were the original commenters somehow lacking in their knowledge of history? Or is there an inside joke, a macabre humor that only an African could get after living with such leaders?

So, going with the earlier commentary as a guide, I republished the post (with Richard's permission) believing that the majority of ICTworks readers would have the same reaction as those that read the original post. Such is not the case.

Besides the comments below, I've received several private emails disagreeing with the use of these three Africans to describe the ICT field. Also, those that still live under one of the leaders have pointed out that such leaders don't take kindly to unauthorized, much less possibly unflattering descriptions or associations.

So I've removed the post. If you would like to read it and the original commentary, you can find it here: The 3 types of developers you will find in Africa.

When people talk of the many languages of Africa, and need for localized content, they're often thinking about English, French, Kiswalhili, or Xhosa.

But in the technology space we have our own languages in addition to these. We have languages of hardware and networking, from servers, to routers, to nodes and bridges, to the languages of code, like PHP, Java, and C++.

Thanks to Jonathan Gosier, we now know the popularity of each programming language in Africa with this handy chart:

Now why would it matter to a business that Java is way more popular than J2ME? There is business opportunity in this variability. If you are a big company, you should try to dominate the Java and PHP market, but if your small, walk away from the popular languages. You'll not beat the big players at their own game.

Yet a new entrant who is willing to gamble on Python or Ruby can make a name for themselves before the big players know what happened. Also, with unique skills, you can price your services at a premium to others, making your company much more profitable. See Apple as a great example.

Just be sure that if you choose one language to focus on, you keep some skills in several. This will allow you to translate between them as needed, matching the right software language to the job.

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