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because people have shit to do and no time to study a new language at work Which is really a positive - if you start a new effort in F#, it basically self-sele

by kirse 5y ago

because people have shit to do and no time to study a new language at work Which is really a positive - if you start a new effort in F#, it basically self-selects for the most technically curious or proficient devs. Most corporate C# code-slingers are fearful of learning it or putting themselves through the mindset shift required to grok basic FP principles. "Do you know or are you interested in learning F#" becomes the only interview question required. But I do agree, if you have to build a team around the "least common denominator" then pick the boring tech stack and go.

majormajor 5y ago
Willingness to try a language or framework is an extremely poor selection criteria for being able to use it well or even being willing to learn how to use it well. I've seen enough shit-ass Ruby or Kotlin or Scala from people who were like "awesome, I love learning new languages!" but never got past "oh, what's the fastest hack I can find to do this in a similar way to how I'd do it in the last language I used?"
reader_mode 5y ago
Introducing something into an existing team and starting a project or team are very different things. But I share some of your reasoning and am curious how this actually plays out (I haven't seen any examples so far). One project I worked on, when starting they wanted to do Clojure and they ended up using RoR because everyone was using it and Clojure was a hiring concern. In retrospect RoR fell out of favour, there's a bunch of vacancies for it but it's not very hot so it's hard to find devs and they are forced to take "learn on the job" just like with Clojure, plus you need to compete with a bunch of employers looking to support their projects in now out of fashion stack. I think using Clojure would give them a unique candidate pool and be a hiring differentiator. But that's just speculation. I haven't actually seen how this choice works out in practice.
- kirse 5y ago
  Jane Street (OCaml) and Jet.com (F#, sold to Wal-Mart) are two obvious $B examples. It seems to be more industry-dependent as well.
  - anotherhue 5y ago
    It worked well early on but once we ran out of F# devs to hire we regressed to the mean.
    - dharmaturtle 5y ago
      Arguably that's a "good problem to have". A startup in its early days pretty much requires all its engineers to punch above their weight class. Every company slows down/averages out as once it starts to scale.
majjgepolja 5y ago
This argument 'it selects for intelligent devs' needs to die. it just selects for people who have hipster level enthusiasm about function programming. That doesn't mean proficient. Many talented developers have a life of their own, and can do well without changing the language. That's why Joel said 'smart AND gets things done'.

by kirse 5y ago

majormajor 5y ago

Willingness to try a language or framework is an extremely poor selection criteria for being able to use it well or even being willing to learn how to use it well. I've seen enough shit-ass Ruby or Kotlin or Scala from people who were like "awesome, I love learning new languages!" but never got past "oh, what's the fastest hack I can find to do this in a similar way to how I'd do it in the last language I used?"

reader_mode 5y ago

Introducing something into an existing team and starting a project or team are very different things. But I share some of your reasoning and am curious how this actually plays out (I haven't seen any examples so far). One project I worked on, when starting they wanted to do Clojure and they ended up using RoR because everyone was using it and Clojure was a hiring concern. In retrospect RoR fell out of favour, there's a bunch of vacancies for it but it's not very hot so it's hard to find devs and they are forced to take "learn on the job" just like with Clojure, plus you need to compete with a bunch of employers looking to support their projects in now out of fashion stack. I think using Clojure would give them a unique candidate pool and be a hiring differentiator. But that's just speculation. I haven't actually seen how this choice works out in practice.

kirse 5y ago
Jane Street (OCaml) and Jet.com (F#, sold to Wal-Mart) are two obvious $B examples. It seems to be more industry-dependent as well.
- anotherhue 5y ago
  It worked well early on but once we ran out of F# devs to hire we regressed to the mean.
  - dharmaturtle 5y ago
    Arguably that's a "good problem to have". A startup in its early days pretty much requires all its engineers to punch above their weight class. Every company slows down/averages out as once it starts to scale.

majjgepolja 5y ago

This argument 'it selects for intelligent devs' needs to die. it just selects for people who have hipster level enthusiasm about function programming. That doesn't mean proficient. Many talented developers have a life of their own, and can do well without changing the language. That's why Joel said 'smart AND gets things done'.