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I’d agree with this. In my experience, choosing a language/platform based on the teams experience instead of the best tool for the job is a siren song. It’s les

I’d agree with this. In my experience, choosing a language/platform based on the teams experience instead of the best tool for the job is a siren song. It’s less pain upfront, but way more amortized pain over the life of the project. Start with good engineers who understand CS fundamentals. After a week or two of immersion, they’re passable in a new language. After a month or two, there’s basically no difference with a veteran. Okay, sure there are exceptions with very different paradigms. Kotlin devs may take more time with low-level memory managed C code. C hackers may struggle with Haskell. But Pythonistas can write pretty good Typescript in their first week. In contrast starting with wrong tool for the job, just gets continuously worse as the project progresses. The friction of constantly cutting against the grain is an accumulated drag. As the project grows more complex, the kludges and workarounds become an increasingly heavy burden on a day-to-day basis.

swader999 6y ago
In agreement and I'd add that I think it is a bit arrogant to assume a more junior programmer or a team of them can't learn better programming practices. A good lead will demand good code and support it with mentoring, pairing and time to refactor. It still doesn't give them license to do tech for the sake of tech. Every architectural choice and added complexity has to be justified by the value it brings. But programming for the lowest common skill level on a team is generally a bad idea.
z3t4 6y ago
You might learn 95% in two months, but the last 5% might take decades. One fun thing is that the less you know the more productive you are. So a good strategy is to leave before you learn how horrible your code is, don't stay longer then two years so you don't have to deal with maintainability, performance, scaleability, security, etc.
- lolc 6y ago
  If it were any other profession, I would clearly recognize this as satire.

swader999 6y ago

In agreement and I'd add that I think it is a bit arrogant to assume a more junior programmer or a team of them can't learn better programming practices. A good lead will demand good code and support it with mentoring, pairing and time to refactor. It still doesn't give them license to do tech for the sake of tech. Every architectural choice and added complexity has to be justified by the value it brings. But programming for the lowest common skill level on a team is generally a bad idea.

z3t4 6y ago

You might learn 95% in two months, but the last 5% might take decades. One fun thing is that the less you know the more productive you are. So a good strategy is to leave before you learn how horrible your code is, don't stay longer then two years so you don't have to deal with maintainability, performance, scaleability, security, etc.

lolc 6y ago
If it were any other profession, I would clearly recognize this as satire.