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Posted by spf13 1 day ago

Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages(spf13.com)
133 points | 164 commentspage 3
dh2022 17 hours ago|
Rather than bet the company on a programming language I would prefer to be able to use different languages in an interoperable-fashion.
antfarm 20 hours ago||
For anyone interested: Takkle was "a social networking and media site geared toward those involved in high school sports: players, coaches, and fans" as per this article from 2006, aptly titled "Takkle.com, social networking for jocks".

[https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/takkle-com-s...]

getnormality 17 hours ago||
Maybe the Perl CTO wanted the product in Perl and not PHP because he knew Perl and didn't know PHP? Do we really need all this psychoanalysis and identity stuff to explain that?
etothet 17 hours ago||
This is often the real driver in these decisions. A previous company I worked at had an API written in modern PHP with Laravel. Traffic wasn’t very heavy on most days and we could autoscale when it was required. It worked great and we hadn’t encountered business problems that couldn’t be fairly easily solved within the ecosystem. However, one of the execs on the business side knew some other exec at a big tech company who told our guy that “PHP can’t scale”. So then we get questions if we should we consider rewriting, if we’re using the “best” language for our needs, etc. They wanted to plan for some theoretical future that they couldn’t even define from a business sense.

Sure, it’s good to be aware of future business needs so that we, as technical people, can be asking the right questions to prepare for what that future may look like, but that almost never means a decision about language x over language y. It’s much deeper than that.

lproven 6 hours ago||
> Maybe the Perl CTO

That's an example. It is not the subject under discussion.

tpoacher 7 hours ago||
Bulverism
lproven 6 hours ago|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

Hardly, no.

The entire point of the article is pointing out an entirely different cognitive fallacy.

tailrecursion 23 hours ago||
Let the team choose the language they're most familiar with or most happy with. Then if they choose the wrong one, get a different team.
egorelik 1 day ago||
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that some engineers are not great at arguing the merits and challenges of a programming language. GC vs non-GC should be one of the first and most straightforward decisions made when picking a language. It's hard to tell in this situation given that there are no concrete examples of what the arguments were, but if one is seriously considering Go for a domain, then they don't actually need the complexity a non-GC language brings.

If anything, maybe this says there is room for a Rust-like GC'd language.

lproven 6 hours ago|
The only conclusion I can draw from your comment is that you wanted to provide an example of the sort of flawed reasoning that the article is in fact discussing.
tailrecursion 23 hours ago||
The story at the beginning proves that choosing your VP is significantly more important than choosing a PL.
ChicagoDave 16 hours ago||
I’d have agreed with this three years ago, but GenAI has made me language agnostic. I’ve created apps with Typescript, Rust, Python, and completely open on more even though my background is 20 years in C#.
morshu9001 20 hours ago||
They can be, especially those who have deeply used multiple langs
ForHackernews 22 hours ago|
Rational choice for an engineer is not the same thing as rational choice for the company. I want to have an interesting working life, learning new things and keeping my CV current. It's not rational for me to shackle my career to doing maintenance fixes on a dying PHP app.
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