4 ms·

This essay promotes the exact opposite: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html So far I've only ever seen terrible CTOs and directors re

This essay promotes the exact opposite: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html So far I've only ever seen terrible CTOs and directors rely on TIOBE to the point I can't take it seriously whatsoever. Choosing a language based on TIOBE will yield you an endless supply of mediocre resumes for your job applications most of the time. I feel like a company using a language they've carefully chosen for the problems they want solved with a strong training program for new hires will have a huge advantage over a company solving the same problems using languages naively taken from TIOBE. From experience, the later company will easily spend two to three times as much in development costs and time for a product of lesser quality. If you go with an esoteric language and then find new hires who already know the language, you know they weren't told to learn it. They were passionate enough to learn it on their own and these hires usually are golden.

dominotw 10y ago
Has anyone build a company with > 15,000 employees using a niche language? ( or even 1000 employees ) I was using TIOBE as an agrument against a language for a huge company not as an argument for a programming language.
- jeremiep 10y ago
  Not overnight, and companies aren't built starting at 15k employees. If you're already at 15k employees then pilot projects are the way to go; gradually incorporate the new tech in the company using low-risk projects. Their post-mortems will provide loads of material to decide whether its worth it as well as how to plan for formations should you stick with the tech. I've done it before, although not at 15k scale, but the method should scale all the same. If you're a startup, going with TIOBE will probably help your competitors more than anything else really. All languages were niche at some point. OS X was built on Objective-C and Windows on C++. I'd argue they both were niche languages at the time. Google spawned Go. Facebook spawned Flow. Microsoft also spawned TypeScript. Programmer time is an extremely underrated metric and these niche languages are all attempts at improving it. If they succeed they stop being niche languages, at which point anyone already using them have a huge head start. Companies not focusing on improving it are doomed to be replaced by those who do. Just like companies who kept to assembly are now history.
  - dominotw 10y ago
    You still haven't answered my question. Is there a single company on the planet that has scaled to big company using a niche programming language. MS/google and other companies inventing their own languages are not good examples. google/fb did not scale using golang/flow they used java/c++/perl/php.
    - jeremiep 10y ago
      Microsoft didn't invent C++, but they started with C which wasn't niche anymore at the time. So you do have a point here. However, you don't see big companies emerging that often anymore nowadays, so that could be a factor as well. And you don't see many startups relying on TIOBE either. Every place where programmer productivity is critical to the company's success is where you'll see niche languages used the most. If startups would stop getting acquired as soon as they get profitable maybe we'd see big companies emerging while using niche languages.
    - pjlegato 10y ago
      iOS and Mac OS X were built and scaled on Objective C, which is highly niche in that it has almost never been used for anything else besides these projects, and it was even less popular before those projects existed. Objective C would never have been chosen with risk-based technology decisionmaking. They would've chosen C++ or Java. Apple was weeks away from bankruptcy when it adopted OS X, and is now one of the most successful companies in the world, having rescaled from the ground up on OS X. The iPhone's iOS is perhaps the most financially successful bit of consumer software in history.
    - iLemming 10y ago
      Clojure ain't a niche language anymore. It is steadily growing. I quit my very well paid job and to my own surprise I found a Clojure job a day after. Anyone who complains that it's impossible to find a job with Clojure projects, I guess aren't really looking.
    - iLemming 10y ago
      Erm... Netscape->Mozilla?
- arkdrag999 10y ago
  We're at like 2000 employees (probably 200 engineers) built primarily on Clojure. We've branched out to more and more languages as we've grown, but at our core we have multiple millions of lines of Clojure code.

dominotw 10y ago

Has anyone build a company with > 15,000 employees using a niche language? ( or even 1000 employees ) I was using TIOBE as an agrument against a language for a huge company not as an argument for a programming language.

jeremiep 10y ago
Not overnight, and companies aren't built starting at 15k employees. If you're already at 15k employees then pilot projects are the way to go; gradually incorporate the new tech in the company using low-risk projects. Their post-mortems will provide loads of material to decide whether its worth it as well as how to plan for formations should you stick with the tech. I've done it before, although not at 15k scale, but the method should scale all the same. If you're a startup, going with TIOBE will probably help your competitors more than anything else really. All languages were niche at some point. OS X was built on Objective-C and Windows on C++. I'd argue they both were niche languages at the time. Google spawned Go. Facebook spawned Flow. Microsoft also spawned TypeScript. Programmer time is an extremely underrated metric and these niche languages are all attempts at improving it. If they succeed they stop being niche languages, at which point anyone already using them have a huge head start. Companies not focusing on improving it are doomed to be replaced by those who do. Just like companies who kept to assembly are now history.
- dominotw 10y ago
  You still haven't answered my question. Is there a single company on the planet that has scaled to big company using a niche programming language. MS/google and other companies inventing their own languages are not good examples. google/fb did not scale using golang/flow they used java/c++/perl/php.
  - jeremiep 10y ago
    Microsoft didn't invent C++, but they started with C which wasn't niche anymore at the time. So you do have a point here. However, you don't see big companies emerging that often anymore nowadays, so that could be a factor as well. And you don't see many startups relying on TIOBE either. Every place where programmer productivity is critical to the company's success is where you'll see niche languages used the most. If startups would stop getting acquired as soon as they get profitable maybe we'd see big companies emerging while using niche languages.
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    iOS and Mac OS X were built and scaled on Objective C, which is highly niche in that it has almost never been used for anything else besides these projects, and it was even less popular before those projects existed. Objective C would never have been chosen with risk-based technology decisionmaking. They would've chosen C++ or Java. Apple was weeks away from bankruptcy when it adopted OS X, and is now one of the most successful companies in the world, having rescaled from the ground up on OS X. The iPhone's iOS is perhaps the most financially successful bit of consumer software in history.
  - iLemming 10y ago
    Clojure ain't a niche language anymore. It is steadily growing. I quit my very well paid job and to my own surprise I found a Clojure job a day after. Anyone who complains that it's impossible to find a job with Clojure projects, I guess aren't really looking.
  - iLemming 10y ago
    Erm... Netscape->Mozilla?
arkdrag999 10y ago
We're at like 2000 employees (probably 200 engineers) built primarily on Clojure. We've branched out to more and more languages as we've grown, but at our core we have multiple millions of lines of Clojure code.