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I think there’s a very strong argument for trying to have only one language at your company, or at least one backend language. Of course you’re still going to h

by yashap 5y ago

I think there’s a very strong argument for trying to have only one language at your company, or at least one backend language. Of course you’re still going to have some scripts, and some config-based programming for infrastructure and whatnot, but otherwise you should basically aim for a single (backend) language IMO. Assuming you’re doing reasonably high level work (like building a typical SaaS product, not a database), I also think you’re probably best off choosing a language with the following properties: - statically typed - garbage collected - reasonably performant - reasonably easy to hire for, or at least pretty quick to learn - compiles pretty fast - has a strong ecosystem, great libraries/frameworks/tooling Java fits, but so do Go, C# and TypeScript. This article says Go is too new, C# not cross platform enough - both true in 2014, but not 2021. And it doesn’t mention TypeScript, but it was VERY new in 2014, so understandable. It’s performance isn’t as good as the other 3, but has the major advantage of letting you have a single FE and BE language for a lot of projects. My current company is full stack TS (RESTful services with TS/React on the web, TS/React Native on mobile), and it’s very convenient/productive most of the time. Scala is my personal favourite language, but I’ll agree it’s too hard to hire/train for to be a practical choice. But Java has plenty of competition from Go, C# and TypeScript.

twic 5y ago
> I think there’s a very strong argument for trying to have only one language at your company, or at least one backend language. Of course you’re still going to have some scripts, and some config-based programming for infrastructure and whatnot, but otherwise you should basically aim for a single (backend) language IMO. Perhaps the real kernel of the advice in the article is "try to use your primary language as much as you can, even for things it is not traditionally used for". My team mostly writes Java. We do write Python for a lot of little scripts - collecting and munging data, dashboards, etc. I have come to think that we should just do those in Java as well.

by yashap 5y ago

twic 5y ago

> I think there’s a very strong argument for trying to have only one language at your company, or at least one backend language. Of course you’re still going to have some scripts, and some config-based programming for infrastructure and whatnot, but otherwise you should basically aim for a single (backend) language IMO. Perhaps the real kernel of the advice in the article is "try to use your primary language as much as you can, even for things it is not traditionally used for". My team mostly writes Java. We do write Python for a lot of little scripts - collecting and munging data, dashboards, etc. I have come to think that we should just do those in Java as well.