3 ms·

I'm from Python and JavaScript lands and I'm currently learning Rust very slowly. There are many reasons why I feel Erlang or Go or Rust shines brighter in man

I'm from Python and JavaScript lands and I'm currently learning Rust very slowly. There are many reasons why I feel Erlang or Go or Rust shines brighter in many situations but my issue is that I not only need to get up to speed, build scrappy prototypes fast, but also hopefully, hire other engineers including juniors. There are many ways one can build systems with multiple languages and take the benefit that each has to offer in specific cases. Python itself calls C in multiple libraries to speed up code. Some of the safety related paradigms are really practical but to adopt a new language means a lot of risk for the startup too. Not every tech leader is so capable as to juggle both the delivery stress of features and building idiomatic software in a new language, I know I would struggle. So I keep learning and I will wait for when specific cases demand me to use another language and use something like gRPC in between my existing codebase and the one in a new language. I do not (should not) have to move away from what already works well to adopt new tools or paradigms.

pmontra 5y ago
IHMO junior develpers are not a problem. A customer of mine hired a developer at his first job after university. He graduated in Mathematics with some college level expertise of Java. We gave him an Ubuntu VM with Elixir and our Phoenix project and he learned to work and to use the language (the former is more difficult than the latter.) I think that learning Elixir was as difficult for him as it would have been learning any other language, including Java in a real world environment. The problem could be with senior developers: if we had no experience with Elixir we probably would have resisted starting a new project (the main project of the company) with a new language. But this is the same with any language. Would I be confident to build a company on Python or Ruby or JS if I didn't know them well? Not at all. Would I start with Java? Not after all the years I have not used it.

pmontra 5y ago

IHMO junior develpers are not a problem. A customer of mine hired a developer at his first job after university. He graduated in Mathematics with some college level expertise of Java. We gave him an Ubuntu VM with Elixir and our Phoenix project and he learned to work and to use the language (the former is more difficult than the latter.) I think that learning Elixir was as difficult for him as it would have been learning any other language, including Java in a real world environment. The problem could be with senior developers: if we had no experience with Elixir we probably would have resisted starting a new project (the main project of the company) with a new language. But this is the same with any language. Would I be confident to build a company on Python or Ruby or JS if I didn't know them well? Not at all. Would I start with Java? Not after all the years I have not used it.