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The benefits of using Rust come as a consequence of a team that learns and chooses Rust on its own. It is likely a more committed team, which would produced bet

by yobbo 4y ago

The benefits of using Rust come as a consequence of a team that learns and chooses Rust on its own. It is likely a more committed team, which would produced better code in any language. Migrating a team of PHP, Javascript and Go programmers to Rust for no technical reason seems just hopeless. It's putting the cart before the horse.

ecshafer 4y ago
I think its Paul Graham that made the argument to have a "weird" language as your startup language for this reason. Sure there are a billion C#, Java or Javascript developers out there. But if you make your start up in obscure lang you'll get a lot of high minded hard working engineers that will go there and build something awesome because its interesting.
- Patrol8394 4y ago
  The flip side is that your business now depends on those few high skilled engineers. Much harder to replace. I would probably go for a main stream programming language / platform: Java / JavaScript / Go / Ruby / Python
- nlitened 4y ago
  > I think its Paul Graham that made the argument to have a "weird" language as your startup language for this reason. I think you do that by using the “weird” language starting from team size of one, not by convincing 40 people to re-write 500k lines of already working code base.
- fauigerzigerk 4y ago
  I found many of PG's essays insightful and inspiring, but I think this particular idea is rather questionable. I want to hire people that are interested in solving the problem. Are these really the same people obsessing about programming languages? Does obsessing about programming languages really correlate with being an obsessive problem solver in general? I'm not so sure about that. My observation is that people can be deeply interested in one thing while being completely indifferent towards other things. Obsessing about everything is a mental illness. Maybe it depends on the problem space. If the technology part of the problem is simple and the main issue is how to increase productivity then PG's argument makes sense. But if you have a difficult problem to solve that isn't developer productivity, then I think it doesn't make sense to hire people motivated by the choice of programming language.

by yobbo 4y ago

ecshafer 4y ago

I think its Paul Graham that made the argument to have a "weird" language as your startup language for this reason. Sure there are a billion C#, Java or Javascript developers out there. But if you make your start up in obscure lang you'll get a lot of high minded hard working engineers that will go there and build something awesome because its interesting.

Patrol8394 4y ago
The flip side is that your business now depends on those few high skilled engineers. Much harder to replace. I would probably go for a main stream programming language / platform: Java / JavaScript / Go / Ruby / Python
nlitened 4y ago
> I think its Paul Graham that made the argument to have a "weird" language as your startup language for this reason. I think you do that by using the “weird” language starting from team size of one, not by convincing 40 people to re-write 500k lines of already working code base.
fauigerzigerk 4y ago
I found many of PG's essays insightful and inspiring, but I think this particular idea is rather questionable. I want to hire people that are interested in solving the problem. Are these really the same people obsessing about programming languages? Does obsessing about programming languages really correlate with being an obsessive problem solver in general? I'm not so sure about that. My observation is that people can be deeply interested in one thing while being completely indifferent towards other things. Obsessing about everything is a mental illness. Maybe it depends on the problem space. If the technology part of the problem is simple and the main issue is how to increase productivity then PG's argument makes sense. But if you have a difficult problem to solve that isn't developer productivity, then I think it doesn't make sense to hire people motivated by the choice of programming language.