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Smart people can move between languages easily. It's concepts, understanding of problems and patterns that are important. I will continue to choose languages t

by kondro 16y ago

Smart people can move between languages easily. It's concepts, understanding of problems and patterns that are important. I will continue to choose languages that I enjoy and will continue to recruit people who also enjoy the challenge of learning new things. Sure, a new hire may not have any Scala/Ruby/Erlang experience, but if they understand about source control (you'd be surprised!), testing, enterprise patterns and how to solve a God-damned problem, that's all that is important.

edanm 16y ago
"Smart people can move between languages easily. It's concepts, understanding of problems and patterns that are important." Important to what? When starting a company, I think it's perfectly reasonable to worry about how easy it is to find people who know how to use your tools already. Sure, you can always train new people, but it takes time. In a new company, time is usually against you. Not to mention, you want a good ecosystem for your tools, so you can leverage other people's work.
- kondro 16y ago
  Important to being a great developer. Languages and tools are interchangeable. It's the basics - the ability to problem solve, learn and adapt to new environments that are truly important and timeless. Sure, being exposed to a new set of languages and tools can have some start-up penalty. But if it takes someone more than a few weeks (< 3) to be good at Scala, Ruby, Python, etc then there is something wrong. Running through a complete tutorial and solving real problems on a real codebase over a couple of weeks should be more than enough time to become proficient with a specific language if you already have the skills of being able to problem-solve. Don't confuse choice in your ecosystem of tools for quality. Just because there are tens of thousands of libraries for Java and .Net doesn't mean they are all good or that you can automatically choose the good ones. The beauty of a more recently popular languages is that smart people tend to be attracted to them and, in my experience, they tend to create better quality libraries and tools, even though they are less of them.

by kondro 16y ago

edanm 16y ago

"Smart people can move between languages easily. It's concepts, understanding of problems and patterns that are important." Important to what? When starting a company, I think it's perfectly reasonable to worry about how easy it is to find people who know how to use your tools already. Sure, you can always train new people, but it takes time. In a new company, time is usually against you. Not to mention, you want a good ecosystem for your tools, so you can leverage other people's work.

kondro 16y ago
Important to being a great developer. Languages and tools are interchangeable. It's the basics - the ability to problem solve, learn and adapt to new environments that are truly important and timeless. Sure, being exposed to a new set of languages and tools can have some start-up penalty. But if it takes someone more than a few weeks (< 3) to be good at Scala, Ruby, Python, etc then there is something wrong. Running through a complete tutorial and solving real problems on a real codebase over a couple of weeks should be more than enough time to become proficient with a specific language if you already have the skills of being able to problem-solve. Don't confuse choice in your ecosystem of tools for quality. Just because there are tens of thousands of libraries for Java and .Net doesn't mean they are all good or that you can automatically choose the good ones. The beauty of a more recently popular languages is that smart people tend to be attracted to them and, in my experience, they tend to create better quality libraries and tools, even though they are less of them.