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It's not a tactic. The story was that at one point the tech person in charge wanted to use ocaml because he liked it. The project was a success and there was ne

It's not a tactic. The story was that at one point the tech person in charge wanted to use ocaml because he liked it. The project was a success and there was never any reason to change it. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with these two phenomena of the corporate world: A) techie pushes tool not because it's useful or necessary but because he wants to learn the tool B) something that started as happenstance ends up as a defining property of critical infrastructure.

pavel_lishin 1y ago
We're currently (very slowly) working to deprecate our Elixir codebase. I wasn't around when it was adopted, but it definitely felt like someone joined the company, evangelized Elixir, hired maybe half a dozen people who were really good at it, and then left. Eventually, our Elixir experts evaporated, leaving maybe two people who truly understand it and can do difficult work in it. That's not sustainable. Someone else in the comments here said that a good developer can be productive in any language, and that's true - but why hobble people? It's like saying a good surgeon can be productive with a butterknife and a pot of boiling water, or a good artist can be productive with a charred stick.
- hollerith 1y ago
  Interesting. So the people you already have can't just learn Elixir to the required standard.
  - learningstud 1y ago
    This speaks volumes of why the Elixir people left in the first place. As a separate point, if a company wants the most generally applicable programming language, there is no reason to look further than C, yet few companies are like this.
- hollerith 1y ago
  Interesting. So the people you already have can't just learn Elixir to the required standard or rather doing so is not in their self-interest.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    > or rather doing so is not in their self-interest. Nor in the interest of the company at large, to be honest. Elixir doesn't really give us anything specific for our use case that other, more popular languages, don't also offer.
- zkry 1y ago
  From reading this, it sounds more like a management problem more than anything else. For example, retention goals should be such that all a companies experts (at anything, not just language) don't evaporate overnight and hiring goals should be such that experts are retrained and re-hired. I think the analogy is also off a bit. I't be more apt to say a good surgeon should be expected to use electrosurgical units from different manufacturers, which is a completely fair expectation.
yawaramin 1y ago
> techie pushes tool not because it's useful or necessary but because he wants to learn the tool I wouldn't say Yaron Minsky was pushing OCaml because he wanted to 'learn' it. By that time he had already written the most popular PGP key exchange server...in OCaml: https://github.com/SKS-Keyserver/sks-keyserver/graphs/contributors https://github.com/SKS-Keyserver/sks-keyserver/graphs/contri...
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
  I didn't say Yaron Minsky pushed OCaml because he wanted to learn it. I said it was because he liked it. Still, the distinction isn't important to the point I was trying to make.

pavel_lishin 1y ago

We're currently (very slowly) working to deprecate our Elixir codebase. I wasn't around when it was adopted, but it definitely felt like someone joined the company, evangelized Elixir, hired maybe half a dozen people who were really good at it, and then left. Eventually, our Elixir experts evaporated, leaving maybe two people who truly understand it and can do difficult work in it. That's not sustainable. Someone else in the comments here said that a good developer can be productive in any language, and that's true - but why hobble people? It's like saying a good surgeon can be productive with a butterknife and a pot of boiling water, or a good artist can be productive with a charred stick.

hollerith 1y ago
Interesting. So the people you already have can't just learn Elixir to the required standard.
- learningstud 1y ago
  This speaks volumes of why the Elixir people left in the first place. As a separate point, if a company wants the most generally applicable programming language, there is no reason to look further than C, yet few companies are like this.
hollerith 1y ago
Interesting. So the people you already have can't just learn Elixir to the required standard or rather doing so is not in their self-interest.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  > or rather doing so is not in their self-interest. Nor in the interest of the company at large, to be honest. Elixir doesn't really give us anything specific for our use case that other, more popular languages, don't also offer.
zkry 1y ago
From reading this, it sounds more like a management problem more than anything else. For example, retention goals should be such that all a companies experts (at anything, not just language) don't evaporate overnight and hiring goals should be such that experts are retrained and re-hired. I think the analogy is also off a bit. I't be more apt to say a good surgeon should be expected to use electrosurgical units from different manufacturers, which is a completely fair expectation.

yawaramin 1y ago

> techie pushes tool not because it's useful or necessary but because he wants to learn the tool I wouldn't say Yaron Minsky was pushing OCaml because he wanted to 'learn' it. By that time he had already written the most popular PGP key exchange server...in OCaml: https://github.com/SKS-Keyserver/sks-keyserver/graphs/contributors https://github.com/SKS-Keyserver/sks-keyserver/graphs/contri...

jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
I didn't say Yaron Minsky pushed OCaml because he wanted to learn it. I said it was because he liked it. Still, the distinction isn't important to the point I was trying to make.