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Yet another myth that comes from not working in big companies... Learning a language is mostly useless for several reasons: 1) You will be among the only person

Yet another myth that comes from not working in big companies... Learning a language is mostly useless for several reasons: 1) You will be among the only person who is willing to learn it 2) You will have no capable reviewers, and usually you need about 2 for each CR 3) Your team has no production knowledge and muscle memory for that language. Ergo pretty much all you do will be garbage for a very long time and a huge operational risk. 4) Other teams at your company will not know this language either. Bottom line: Pick the language most teams at your company are familiar with. At Amazon that simply is Java for anything that is not frontend, period. Even getting into Kotlin presents a major obstacle. Clojure? Yeah right. Edit: Just to clarify. Working in a big company is not meant as a restriction. In fact, having worked in several startups before, these would do well to adopt the same principles for programming and prohibit this "university graduate" way of developing software. In the end, if your startup is going to survive, it's going to become a big company itself someday.

ulucs 7y ago
Learning a language that is almost completely useless for your company is still useful for you. It adds to your skill set, increases your market value and keeps you learning. Only learning corporate-approved languages is a bit shortsighted. Tech companies, development paradigms and programming languages all have shorter lifespans than humans. COBOL and Fortran, once very successful and popular languages have stopped being mainstream for a while. And those two were the survivors of their batch. Who knows how many then-popular languages have faded away to obscurity? Also you have to keep learning even if you are to stick to the same language. Java is not 1.6 anymore. Languages keep evolving by borrowing good ideas from other languages. So why not use your learning time to stay ahead of the curve? Edit: All languages have their places, even in big companies. Could Whatsapp and Discord have grown at the same pace while using Java/C#? BEAM is the right tooling for them and it has paid off.
- apta 7y ago
  > Could Whatsapp and Discord have grown at the same pace while using Java/C#? Arguably, yes. The JVM and .NET CLR are both superior platforms when it comes to performance. They also both offer actor models with supervision (e.g. Akka/Akka.NET).

ulucs 7y ago

Learning a language that is almost completely useless for your company is still useful for you. It adds to your skill set, increases your market value and keeps you learning. Only learning corporate-approved languages is a bit shortsighted. Tech companies, development paradigms and programming languages all have shorter lifespans than humans. COBOL and Fortran, once very successful and popular languages have stopped being mainstream for a while. And those two were the survivors of their batch. Who knows how many then-popular languages have faded away to obscurity? Also you have to keep learning even if you are to stick to the same language. Java is not 1.6 anymore. Languages keep evolving by borrowing good ideas from other languages. So why not use your learning time to stay ahead of the curve? Edit: All languages have their places, even in big companies. Could Whatsapp and Discord have grown at the same pace while using Java/C#? BEAM is the right tooling for them and it has paid off.

apta 7y ago
> Could Whatsapp and Discord have grown at the same pace while using Java/C#? Arguably, yes. The JVM and .NET CLR are both superior platforms when it comes to performance. They also both offer actor models with supervision (e.g. Akka/Akka.NET).