> It is a price worth paying for better language ergonomics Back around 2001 or so, I was hired at an online travel agency to assist in porting their entire sy

> It is a price worth paying for better language ergonomics Back around 2001 or so, I was hired at an online travel agency to assist in porting their entire system from C++ to Java. Management at the time was frustrated at how long it took to add new features in the C++ codebase - it could take months to get something working in some cases, and they blamed the programming language. Once we got everything working in Java, we found that we could, in fact, turn around feature requests much faster than they could in C++. The trade-off was performance problems: they (we) found that in the old C++ codebase, if you fucked something up, the whole thing crashed, and you had to fix it before you could get it to run. In Java, programmers could paper over their fuck-ups pretty easily so that they wouldn’t be noticed until they had created a snowball effect that caused everything to slow down. Since management was pushing for more features faster, they were incentivizing developers to do as little testing as possible and kick the can down the road. For the most part, management was OK with this: they just bought more, and more, and more servers to make up for the performance problems we were having from the quick-turnaround features they wanted.