All good points. Very interesting point about Instagram. The solution to that IMO is building upon a language-agnostic messaging system. I believe the Bezos API

All good points. Very interesting point about Instagram. The solution to that IMO is building upon a language-agnostic messaging system. I believe the Bezos API mandate addressed this. This would allow a small team to use a better-suited language and still interface with the rest of the company. > Counterpoint. What if it's an impossible task for languages to encode a business domain and they should give your developers the tools to do it and then get out of the way? Its still opinionated. Its just that the opinions are coming from your businesses stack. Interesting point; that there is no general-purpose language that perfectly encodes every business domain. I disagree with giving the developers the tools and getting out of the way. The management is still responsible for the outcome of the project and needs more control than this. Yes, fungibility of developers is a concern. If the developers hold equity in the project, they are incentivized to support fungibility as well, to allow the company to grow. IMO start-ups should reduce the proprietary code opinions as much as possible, and rely on well-publicized code patterns as much as possible. This both grows the hireable talent pool, and makes it easier for new hires to understand the system once inside. Since start-ups tend to pay less than large companies and the equity is high risk, it is unfair IMO to require new employees to learn a highly-opinionated proprietary start-up tech stack. The requirement to learn a proprietary stack is more justifiable in large companies where the financial compensation is more reliable and often higher.