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I don't think it's fair to include F# in that list, what with its emphasis on explicitness. After all, it's not like functional programming requires writing obs

I don't think it's fair to include F# in that list, what with its emphasis on explicitness. After all, it's not like functional programming requires writing obscure code any more than complex object hierarchies pushing events and callbacks all over the place until you have no idea how you got where you are. What actually causes trouble in an enterprise setting is not any particular paradigm itself, but "magic." All that flexibility of Scala or Lisp is great in the small, but it doesn't scale easily. You are effectively building new DSLs in them, and then everyone that comes to the project has to first learn the specific variation that you ended up with. The problem is that people usually neither acknowledge they are building a language, nor think about design of that language to make it easy to learn and use, including documentation. So new people come and are completely lost. If they are experienced in the given base language, it is only easier for them to find the starting point to reverse engineer what was done, but that work still has to be done. This actually happens in Java and other less "magic" languages as well, but then nobody blames the language: they blame frameworks and development practices in a particular shop. Additionally, the whole mindset of "easier to hire a Java dev" only makes sense for juniors, if at all. Developers are meant to be problem solvers, and any particular language or framework is but a small part of the overall toolset they should have. Sure, if they are experienced in a particular language that you are using, they will have easier time starting up, but that is only a short term benefit.

6thaccount2 7y ago
As a non developer, but someone who codes, the hire for Java mindset always confused me. If I can pickup an entirely new language (with the exception of Haskell) in a few days, so should a professional. Then, I noticed how low the bar is for an average developer when it comes to understanding their tooling, basic commandline knowledge, and problem solving. Sure, the best developers can solve a business problem with pretty much anything if they have to, but the average one chooses a major language and framework and hacks things together with stack overflow. We've all done that before, but then again good problem solvers are also capable of picking up a book and learning something new like Lisp and a lot of developers simply aren't going to do that ever.
- anon9001 7y ago
  The average developer cannot pick up an entirely new language in a few days. Maybe I'm incompetent, but it takes me a few months before I start to feel comfortable with a new language and its ecosystem, and a year or two before I feel like I really understand the nuances and know just where to look when something goes wrong. I can easily find someone with 5+ years of full time Java development (or JS, Python, and Ruby), and that means they're going to come fully equipped to dive into a problem, using familiar patterns and libraries. I don't want to hire people to make them learn Scala as quickly as possible and hope that they're able to figure it out very quickly. > the average one chooses a major language and framework and hacks things together with stack overflow Call me average, but I spend most of the day googling and reading results on SO. I think most developers do the same. Even if I already know how to do something, I usually google it to see if there's a better way to write it. If you're working with Scala (or some other less popular language), you're going to have less results doing these things, because less people are going to have hit your special problem. There is no amount of amazing language features that make this trade-off worth it. And it's not just true for languages, it's true for frameworks too. Using common stuff (language choice, framework choice, library choice, compiler choice, etc) makes it so much easier to solve the problems you'll inevitably run into.
  - pitkali 7y ago
    > The average developer cannot pick up an entirely new language in a few days. Maybe I'm incompetent, but it takes me a few months before I start to feel comfortable with a new language and its ecosystem, and a year or two before I feel like I really understand the nuances and know just where to look when something goes wrong. I have to agree that in most cases few days are not realistic, but I'm convinced you could apply Pareto principle and state that you can get most things done with knowing just enough of the language. A year or two to understand nuances sounds like not making a deliberate effort to learn about them and instead just waiting until you get that through osmosis by just working with the language. It works, but it's slower than deliberate effort to identify differences from what you know already and learning specifically about them. At any rate, arguments like that neglect that most languages are very similar, and after learning a few quite different ones the differences with most others become largely superficial. > I can easily find someone with 5+ years of full time Java development (or JS, Python, and Ruby), and that means they're going to come fully equipped to dive into a problem, using familiar patterns and libraries. Yes, and no. You assume that all people using the same language use similar patterns and libraries. Assuming recent experience with Python or Ruby that might be close enough to true in those languages, but I heard that in case of JS the ecosystem is incredibly diverse. Setting aside any particular language, any sufficiently large codebase will have its own idiosyncrasies that add to the entry barrier. > I don't want to hire people to make them learn Scala as quickly as possible and hope that they're able to figure it out very quickly. You seem to be optimising for "very" short time horizon. It strikes me as short-sighted. You also seem to underestimate how much knowing the JVM as the runtime environment gives you. > If you're working with Scala (or some other less popular language), you're going to have less results doing these things, because less people are going to have hit your special problem. There will of course be fewer results, but you seem to assume that has to mean you will regularly run into trouble. Numerically, most Google results are bogus or even misguided anyway. You might try to argue that having more people using given technology increases the odds of finding a good solution, but that requires relatively stable signal to noise ratio across different technologies. I don't think that is necessarily the case. Additionally, Scala might be poor example for this one, as it is actually used quite a lot in industry. It is nowhere near as esoteric as Haskell, for example. > There is no amount of amazing language features that make this trade-off worth it. This is a very dogmatic statement that I strongly disagree with. It is ironic to read it on Hacker News, given the emphasis from Paul Graham on how much velocity he gained by starting his career (were those e-shops?) in Lisp and being able to iterate much more quickly because of that. It is especially ironic given your focus on short term earlier in the post. > And it's not just true for languages, it's true for frameworks too. Using common stuff (language choice, framework choice, library choice, compiler choice, etc) makes it so much easier to solve the problems you'll inevitably run into. Straying from the common path should be weighed carefully for sure. But never forget that if you are far enough from the lowest common denominator for which it has to optimise, you might actually get way more mileage by using something else. Right tool for the job and all that.

6thaccount2 7y ago

As a non developer, but someone who codes, the hire for Java mindset always confused me. If I can pickup an entirely new language (with the exception of Haskell) in a few days, so should a professional. Then, I noticed how low the bar is for an average developer when it comes to understanding their tooling, basic commandline knowledge, and problem solving. Sure, the best developers can solve a business problem with pretty much anything if they have to, but the average one chooses a major language and framework and hacks things together with stack overflow. We've all done that before, but then again good problem solvers are also capable of picking up a book and learning something new like Lisp and a lot of developers simply aren't going to do that ever.

anon9001 7y ago
The average developer cannot pick up an entirely new language in a few days. Maybe I'm incompetent, but it takes me a few months before I start to feel comfortable with a new language and its ecosystem, and a year or two before I feel like I really understand the nuances and know just where to look when something goes wrong. I can easily find someone with 5+ years of full time Java development (or JS, Python, and Ruby), and that means they're going to come fully equipped to dive into a problem, using familiar patterns and libraries. I don't want to hire people to make them learn Scala as quickly as possible and hope that they're able to figure it out very quickly. > the average one chooses a major language and framework and hacks things together with stack overflow Call me average, but I spend most of the day googling and reading results on SO. I think most developers do the same. Even if I already know how to do something, I usually google it to see if there's a better way to write it. If you're working with Scala (or some other less popular language), you're going to have less results doing these things, because less people are going to have hit your special problem. There is no amount of amazing language features that make this trade-off worth it. And it's not just true for languages, it's true for frameworks too. Using common stuff (language choice, framework choice, library choice, compiler choice, etc) makes it so much easier to solve the problems you'll inevitably run into.
- pitkali 7y ago
  > The average developer cannot pick up an entirely new language in a few days. Maybe I'm incompetent, but it takes me a few months before I start to feel comfortable with a new language and its ecosystem, and a year or two before I feel like I really understand the nuances and know just where to look when something goes wrong. I have to agree that in most cases few days are not realistic, but I'm convinced you could apply Pareto principle and state that you can get most things done with knowing just enough of the language. A year or two to understand nuances sounds like not making a deliberate effort to learn about them and instead just waiting until you get that through osmosis by just working with the language. It works, but it's slower than deliberate effort to identify differences from what you know already and learning specifically about them. At any rate, arguments like that neglect that most languages are very similar, and after learning a few quite different ones the differences with most others become largely superficial. > I can easily find someone with 5+ years of full time Java development (or JS, Python, and Ruby), and that means they're going to come fully equipped to dive into a problem, using familiar patterns and libraries. Yes, and no. You assume that all people using the same language use similar patterns and libraries. Assuming recent experience with Python or Ruby that might be close enough to true in those languages, but I heard that in case of JS the ecosystem is incredibly diverse. Setting aside any particular language, any sufficiently large codebase will have its own idiosyncrasies that add to the entry barrier. > I don't want to hire people to make them learn Scala as quickly as possible and hope that they're able to figure it out very quickly. You seem to be optimising for "very" short time horizon. It strikes me as short-sighted. You also seem to underestimate how much knowing the JVM as the runtime environment gives you. > If you're working with Scala (or some other less popular language), you're going to have less results doing these things, because less people are going to have hit your special problem. There will of course be fewer results, but you seem to assume that has to mean you will regularly run into trouble. Numerically, most Google results are bogus or even misguided anyway. You might try to argue that having more people using given technology increases the odds of finding a good solution, but that requires relatively stable signal to noise ratio across different technologies. I don't think that is necessarily the case. Additionally, Scala might be poor example for this one, as it is actually used quite a lot in industry. It is nowhere near as esoteric as Haskell, for example. > There is no amount of amazing language features that make this trade-off worth it. This is a very dogmatic statement that I strongly disagree with. It is ironic to read it on Hacker News, given the emphasis from Paul Graham on how much velocity he gained by starting his career (were those e-shops?) in Lisp and being able to iterate much more quickly because of that. It is especially ironic given your focus on short term earlier in the post. > And it's not just true for languages, it's true for frameworks too. Using common stuff (language choice, framework choice, library choice, compiler choice, etc) makes it so much easier to solve the problems you'll inevitably run into. Straying from the common path should be weighed carefully for sure. But never forget that if you are far enough from the lowest common denominator for which it has to optimise, you might actually get way more mileage by using something else. Right tool for the job and all that.