The Community Isn't Dry

> The company is placed in a precarious position because it now only has junior engineers in the given technology. Did I tell you that time the place I worked accidentally lost most of their customers phone numbers, because their PHP driver for mongo would convert numeric strings to numbers, and phone numbers would overflow the default integer, resulting in no fatal errors but simply negative phone numbers?

Hate to be one of those guys, but a really simple integration test would have caught this.

I think my larger actual problem with the article is that it brushes over the flaws of a generic, adapted solution. You mention that the differences between a bunch of languages is the standard library, for instance, and you know on some level, you're right. An if statement is an if statement and a lot of these languages are quite similar.

But there's always the want to find 'the jumper that fits' if you get me, and for good reason I think, it can be a waste of time hammering squares into circles so they fit the shape of the solution. These generic adaptable technologies become overcomplicated I find as a result of the push to make them adaptable.

I'm a big fan of specialised technologies if used sparingly. If your stack reads like the tag list to a question on stack overflow, perhaps that's overkill, but in the critical areas for your company, I think you're well served using something that is very close to what you need and needs minimal adaptation.