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I (and it turns out a lot of other people) used to use "do they code in Python?" as a heuristic for "are they a smart self motivated programmer" A similar metr

I (and it turns out a lot of other people) used to use "do they code in Python?" as a heuristic for "are they a smart self motivated programmer" A similar metric you could apply to companies "are they engineering influenced enough to pick a "weird" language". In other words has the company chosen a language on the basis of "we can hire more Java programmers easily" - an awful mindset that suggests all other engineering decisions are a bust. So yes I agree with your baseless speculation- it's probably less baseless than you are worried about

metagame 5y ago
In which Paul Graham served to popularize the idea in August of 2004: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
wikibob 5y ago
I strongly disagree. Software engineering has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Choosing a non-mainstream uses an innovation token on something that does not contribute business value. That’s a huge red flag. Software engineering is now a team sport. Future maintainability and readability is now orders of magnitude more important than nifty tricks when writing the code. See http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/
- _pmf_ 5y ago
  > Future maintainability and readability is now orders of magnitude more important than nifty tricks when writing the code. Explain npm, then.
- metagame 5y ago
  Software engineering has always been a team sport, even though we've known since The Mythical Man Month that throwing more programmers at a problem just slows the work down. Choosing a non-mainstream language can absolutely contribute business value. For example, toy or tool, making your creation extensible adds value. Multiple businesses have spawned from this, and Lisp and Lua are prime candidates of non-mainstream languages that billion dollar companies have decided to choose to build substantial portions of their products around so that users could extend. Even someone who doesn't know AutoLISP can look at an AutoLISP script from decades ago and get it within an hour. For another example, after being scolded for using Unicode to write my overstrikes, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to extend Arc's markdown to add DHTML overstrikes (DHTML and Unicode both have their own ways of doing them). This wasn't hard, despite not being intensely familiar with Arc and pg's programming style being relatively off-beat (Arc is essentially sillyScheme, and he takes full advantage of writing things and defining them later, which is normally easy to cope with but part of the design philosophy of Arc was to minimize syntax, so it sometimes takes longer than you would see in a less holistically-cultivated Scheme). I checked (def markdown ... ) and figured out how to add to it pretty quickly.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dkarl 5y ago
  > Software engineering is now a team sport. "Now" meaning since the 1960s (and probably before)? > See http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/ There are plenty of "weird" (in the sense of the parent comment) "boring" (in the sense of the essay you linked [1]) languages out there. Common Lisp and Erlang spring to mind. They are old technologies, and their capabilities and failure modes are well-understood. Maybe not by me and you and the average programmer off the street, but after decades of use, the knowledge is available. There's also an argument to be had about how much you should value the personal familiarity your team and the people you hire have with the technology. Certainly there's a cost to using unfamiliar technology, and there's a trade-off when choosing between an old, battle-tested, highly capable, but unfamiliar technology and something that is less capable but nearer to hand. [1] "the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood" https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
vlunkr 5y ago
Unless it is and will forever be a very small dev team, choosing a language based on popularity is a great idea. But maybe it depends on what you consider popular. I think Python would qualify.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ByteJockey 5y ago
  Python does now, but that particular phrase goes back to a time when python wasn't even close to where it is now.
ithrow 5y ago
I (and it turns out a lot of other people) used to use "do they code in Python?" as a heuristic for "are they a smart self motivated programmer" Well Peter Norvig switch from lisp to Python.., as also others googlers did when they saw that their teammates writing python where as productive or more than themselves using lisp.
- lukashrb 5y ago
  > Peter Norvig here. I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ithrow 5y ago
    and then: In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    Choosing python as your interview language seems like just an unfair advantage at this point. And then choosing python for complex high performance work seems like asking for a headache at this point.
bmitc 5y ago
> I (and it turns out a lot of other people) used to use "do they code in Python?" as a heuristic for "are they a smart self motivated programmer" Really? It's like asking if something is in the middle of a bell curve, getting an affirmative, and then treating that like an outlier.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  This quote was from almost 20 years ago. Python wasn't that popular in the early 00s, although it wasn't exactly obscure. At the very least, the school I went to in the early 00s didn't have any classes that used Python. And none of my friends learned it from their schools either. The language exposure I got was Java, C, C++, Prolog, Scheme, Perl, Fortran, and ASM. That includes AI and programming paradigms classes. Nowadays, Python wouldn't be the bar you use.
- cultofmetatron 5y ago
  Thats where "used to" makes a huge difference. I remember when the industry standard was to use c++ or java. Using a language like python meant that you were "edgy" or "hip." This was back when Paul Graham really started pushing for acceptance of "hacker" languages (like common lisp or python) when ycombinator was just getting started. He did A lot to increase acceptance of languages outside c,c++, java Now that python is mainstream, other languages stand in to say "I like to learn languages for reasons other than earning a paycheck" examples coming to my mind include Haskell, rust or elixir.
iimblack 5y ago
Choosing a language based on hiring ease is not completely awful. For example where I’m at now we use Go, which is relatively popular, and we’re having an insane time even getting applicants.

metagame 5y ago

In which Paul Graham served to popularize the idea in August of 2004: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

wikibob 5y ago

I strongly disagree. Software engineering has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Choosing a non-mainstream uses an innovation token on something that does not contribute business value. That’s a huge red flag. Software engineering is now a team sport. Future maintainability and readability is now orders of magnitude more important than nifty tricks when writing the code. See http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/

_pmf_ 5y ago
> Future maintainability and readability is now orders of magnitude more important than nifty tricks when writing the code. Explain npm, then.
metagame 5y ago
Software engineering has always been a team sport, even though we've known since The Mythical Man Month that throwing more programmers at a problem just slows the work down. Choosing a non-mainstream language can absolutely contribute business value. For example, toy or tool, making your creation extensible adds value. Multiple businesses have spawned from this, and Lisp and Lua are prime candidates of non-mainstream languages that billion dollar companies have decided to choose to build substantial portions of their products around so that users could extend. Even someone who doesn't know AutoLISP can look at an AutoLISP script from decades ago and get it within an hour. For another example, after being scolded for using Unicode to write my overstrikes, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to extend Arc's markdown to add DHTML overstrikes (DHTML and Unicode both have their own ways of doing them). This wasn't hard, despite not being intensely familiar with Arc and pg's programming style being relatively off-beat (Arc is essentially sillyScheme, and he takes full advantage of writing things and defining them later, which is normally easy to cope with but part of the design philosophy of Arc was to minimize syntax, so it sometimes takes longer than you would see in a less holistically-cultivated Scheme). I checked (def markdown ... ) and figured out how to add to it pretty quickly.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dkarl 5y ago
> Software engineering is now a team sport. "Now" meaning since the 1960s (and probably before)? > See http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/ There are plenty of "weird" (in the sense of the parent comment) "boring" (in the sense of the essay you linked [1]) languages out there. Common Lisp and Erlang spring to mind. They are old technologies, and their capabilities and failure modes are well-understood. Maybe not by me and you and the average programmer off the street, but after decades of use, the knowledge is available. There's also an argument to be had about how much you should value the personal familiarity your team and the people you hire have with the technology. Certainly there's a cost to using unfamiliar technology, and there's a trade-off when choosing between an old, battle-tested, highly capable, but unfamiliar technology and something that is less capable but nearer to hand. [1] "the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood" https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

vlunkr 5y ago

Unless it is and will forever be a very small dev team, choosing a language based on popularity is a great idea. But maybe it depends on what you consider popular. I think Python would qualify.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ByteJockey 5y ago
Python does now, but that particular phrase goes back to a time when python wasn't even close to where it is now.

ithrow 5y ago

I (and it turns out a lot of other people) used to use "do they code in Python?" as a heuristic for "are they a smart self motivated programmer" Well Peter Norvig switch from lisp to Python.., as also others googlers did when they saw that their teammates writing python where as productive or more than themselves using lisp.

lukashrb 5y ago
> Peter Norvig here. I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ithrow 5y ago
  and then: In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  Choosing python as your interview language seems like just an unfair advantage at this point. And then choosing python for complex high performance work seems like asking for a headache at this point.

bmitc 5y ago

> I (and it turns out a lot of other people) used to use "do they code in Python?" as a heuristic for "are they a smart self motivated programmer" Really? It's like asking if something is in the middle of a bell curve, getting an affirmative, and then treating that like an outlier.

bcrosby95 5y ago
This quote was from almost 20 years ago. Python wasn't that popular in the early 00s, although it wasn't exactly obscure. At the very least, the school I went to in the early 00s didn't have any classes that used Python. And none of my friends learned it from their schools either. The language exposure I got was Java, C, C++, Prolog, Scheme, Perl, Fortran, and ASM. That includes AI and programming paradigms classes. Nowadays, Python wouldn't be the bar you use.
cultofmetatron 5y ago
Thats where "used to" makes a huge difference. I remember when the industry standard was to use c++ or java. Using a language like python meant that you were "edgy" or "hip." This was back when Paul Graham really started pushing for acceptance of "hacker" languages (like common lisp or python) when ycombinator was just getting started. He did A lot to increase acceptance of languages outside c,c++, java Now that python is mainstream, other languages stand in to say "I like to learn languages for reasons other than earning a paycheck" examples coming to my mind include Haskell, rust or elixir.

iimblack 5y ago

Choosing a language based on hiring ease is not completely awful. For example where I’m at now we use Go, which is relatively popular, and we’re having an insane time even getting applicants.