4 ms·

If the list is meant to be universal, I would strike the last two from it, and clarify that "fast enough" means, "Fast enough for the problem you're trying to s

If the list is meant to be universal, I would strike the last two from it, and clarify that "fast enough" means, "Fast enough for the problem you're trying to solve." Working from the bottom: Scaling well to large projects is only a concern if you expect your individual projects to become large. I've worked on monoliths, and I've worked on systems that follow more of a Unix philosophy. In the former case, we had one project with a 7 digit line count. In the latter case, it was rare for a single application's codebase to grow to more than a few thousand lines of code. "Plenty of developers to hire from" is often optimizing for the wrong problem. In many lines of business, domain expertise is a much more valuable skill, because it can only be developed through years of first-hand experience. A new programming language, on the other hand, can typically be taught to a reasonably skilled programmer in no more than a couple weeks. Also, when you're just starting out, the single best programming language you can pick is the one that the people actually starting the business already know the best. They will not have senior mentors to help them learn the best way to use a new language. Finally, "fast enough" is not a single target or a strict hierarchy. I used to work at a shop where we used Python, C#, and C++. Only C++ was fast enough, performance-wise, for some problems. Only Python was fast enough, productivity-wise, for other problems. C# covered the (large) middle ground. It's also not a strict hierarchy. At my current job, I'm in the middle of a project to replace some Java components with Python. Java has not proven to be fast enough, performance-wise, for this particular problem, while Python gets us there with room to spare.

oblio 6y ago
> "Plenty of developers to hire from" is often optimizing for the wrong problem. In many lines of business, domain expertise is a much more valuable skill, because it can only be developed through years of first-hand experience. A new programming language, on the other hand, can typically be taught to a reasonably skilled programmer in no more than a couple weeks. This is a gross programming fallacy. Yes, you'll learn the language at the superficial level. But learning the ecosystem, best practices, that takes years. Unless your project is short lived or something trivial, in which care you won't care. But if it's going to live for a long time and will have a major impact, the decision to hire programmers that have 0 experience in your target language will bite you in the butt, years later.

oblio 6y ago

> "Plenty of developers to hire from" is often optimizing for the wrong problem. In many lines of business, domain expertise is a much more valuable skill, because it can only be developed through years of first-hand experience. A new programming language, on the other hand, can typically be taught to a reasonably skilled programmer in no more than a couple weeks. This is a gross programming fallacy. Yes, you'll learn the language at the superficial level. But learning the ecosystem, best practices, that takes years. Unless your project is short lived or something trivial, in which care you won't care. But if it's going to live for a long time and will have a major impact, the decision to hire programmers that have 0 experience in your target language will bite you in the butt, years later.