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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 incorp

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?

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?