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Comment by volkadav | Hacker News Reader

Is one of the three languages context still, or did they finally get rid of all that? ;)

(nytd 2008-2010)

Hahah thankfully the usage and number of DSLs has dropped significantly. I still had to write stuff using Drools (https://www.drools.org/) tho which was the worst thing I've ever had to do in my dev career

I believe the Holy Three are Python, Go, and Java. Personally the fact that Go is on there totally invalidates the list for me. It upset a lot of other people, too, because it's not very widely used in the org and is just a pet favorite of one of the higher ups. Was a serious source of friction.

Why? I understand the holy wars between devotees of Rust and Go, but if anything I'm impressed that the NYT would actually look beyond 1990s languages.

Because it wasn't a widely-used language in the part of the org the decree applied to. It was purely chosen to seem cool and trendy and also because it's one of the higher ups favorite languages.

Hello! I was one of those annoying "architects" saying no, but it wasn't because only three languages are allowed. When I left the Times about six months ago, systems were actively being developed in the following languages: PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Go, Scala. (And ObjC and Swift, if you want to count those.) Plenty of unmaintained legacy systems in other languages, too. So proposals to add yet another language (Clojure, right?) were I think understandably received with some skepticism. It's not that it couldn't happen, just that there'd have to be a hell of a good reason, and there wasn't. It was unfortunate that months of work were invested before a proposal was written, but that wouldn't have been a very good reason to approve it.

For what it's worth, I agree with almost everything else you said.

Thank you for the clarification. I was told by my manager that new projects could only be written in the three above-mentioned languages so I was just going by that. And yes I was part of the Clojure lobby haha.

I really do hope they streamline a bit of the bloat in tech. It's a real shame. So many dev hours wasted in meetings. So many PMs who know more about the intricacies of Kanban and JIRA ticketing but nothing about the product. There's a lot of talent there, though. I think it can be done.

Oh man, count yourself lucky if you never had "fun" with context. :) For everyone who hasn't had that ... joy, imagine perl4, but compiled and running in its own proprietary vm with a ton of employer-environment-specific extensions. It was 100% in-house to the Times. When I interviewed, part of the process was them throwing a screenful of it at you and asking "OK, what does this do?" as a test of your general ability to reason out things you had no possible way of getting pre-exposure to. The only redeeming value that it had really was that it was a) pretty fast b) pretty small in terms of memory requirements. I can't think of a single thing about it that PHP wouldn't be a better fit for though on every metric, and I'm certainly no fan of PHP. After I left that job one of the biggest drivers for me wanting to take compilers eventually was thinking back to what a shitshow working with ctx was and how badly I would've wanted a ctx2php transpiler. I worked on the team that among other things handled the login/auth system, which was sufficiently antediluvian that it had a lot of ctx code.

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