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> A kind of false equivalency. You can't hire a "journeyman (any) programmer off the street" and have them understand the IMF or ALC. Or any complex app. That'

> A kind of false equivalency. You can't hire a "journeyman (any) programmer off the street" and have them understand the IMF or ALC. Or any complex app. That's true, but it's way easier to hire people to write in a language that's widely used and has other career opportunities. A language on life support isn't going to be attractive to the vast majority of programmers and with government pay so much lower than industry, low pay + dead end skills makes it very hard to hire. It's not like the engineering leader in charge of this project can just go ask for more budget to hire some rockstar engineers to knock this out, they're stuck with congressionally defined pay scales. So what they're doing is building their architecture and process around their organizational constraints. That's really good engineering management.

fargle 5y ago
Oh, I agree it's good to have picked a modern language. And yes, I agree with doing it in a proper idiomatic style as opposed to java-in-name-only-basically-still-assembly. But the way they made the argument was disingenuous, I suspect expertly political. No way could they hire engineers "off the street" and understand it right away, that's BS. They say that Wang's method couldn't do this, but slyly imply theirs can. That's what's false. I think this is politics for "if we say clean-sheet re-implementation it sounds scary". The problem is that it is and should be scary and instead of papering over it with cleverly packaged and admirable goals, they should come up with a real plan to do it. That's what makes me think, well excellent politics and strategy, but not-so-expert engineering and technical management.