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0 pointspmcollins8y ago0 comments

But there are so many benefits to standardizing on one language (to take the extreme case). You create the business rules, APIs, and utilities in whatever language you choose and that can be shared by everyone. That becomes the core of your business. If you need something new, you create it and submit it for review, and then everyone can use it, not just the folks who choose what was your preferred language at the time of writing.

I've been in organizations where you have the Language/Platform X people over here and the Language/Platform Y people over there, and they duplicate work, don't collaborate, and their libraries don't interoperate. They have different hiring needs, and developers can't easily move between them. Ultimately, everybody with their pet languages moves on, and new people come into a very fractured environment and ask themselves WTF is this? Over the years, developers (especially new ones) are only a fraction as effective as they would be if the company had just paid the relatively small up-front price of nudging everyone into the same ecosystem.

And BTW, I have yet to encounter a problem that is hard to solve in my preferred language, but is way easier to solve in another. I think the key to that is to choose carefully what you're going to commit to.

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efficax8y ago

> And BTW, I have yet to encounter a problem that is hard to solve in my preferred language, but is way easier to solve in another. I think the key to that is to choose carefully what you're going to commit to.

Long-running light-weight servers are nearly impossible to write in PHP, but a breeze in Go. There are tons of problem spaces where the only available libraries are in C/C++ or Java, which means its going to be easier to solve the problem in those languages than it is to build a new library from scratch. Python has some of the best packages for a number of problems, like machine learning, data science, image manipulation. Even if Go is purpose built for web crawling, beautiful soup (Python) is still what I'd choose for getting a scraper up and running quickly. And of course since The Web Is King everybody has to use JS for something these days.

If you're a large shop doing a lot of things, it's going to be more work to stick to one or two languages than it is to pick the best language for the job.

bluesnowmonkey8y ago

People don't just move between teams, they also move between companies, even moreso in my experience.

There's this mindset in some companies that they're IBM, they are the world, but the it's not like that anymore. You can't expect people to sit through your company training on how to use your proprietary tools and then spend 30 years working there. You want to be able to use all types of people coming in with all types of experience because it's very diverse out there. And they want to use and build skills that they can take to their next company or leverage to start their own company. You want highly motivated individuals with entrepreneurial mindsets right? What kind of environment will attract them?

Go ahead and say, "We only use COBOL here," and see how that works out. Great everything is interoperable. But you've got a team of C players. Maybe that's fine though.

lilactown8y ago

IMO, we should focus more on standardizing on runtimes rather than language. Languages evolve, and new ones come out that solve problems better. We luckily live in an age where many of those languages can interop at the runtime level.

As a developer, and as a team, it sucks to be told "you must use Java and JavaScript for time immemorial." An easy compromise is that any package/library/service/etc. must target the JVM or JavaScript VM and provide interop with existing code.

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