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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually.

It sucks, but it is the reality of the business environment, web side stuff that is abstracted through some HTTP interface you can build in whatever you please but good luck trying to sneak your locally hosted rails app past the Microsoft only mentality prevalent in plenty of businesses.

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Customers will not worry about "alien" technologies, unless you sell the latter as such. This is a basic sales principle.

Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. Clojure is just a Jar, isn't it? Then you are just using a Java library, aren't you?

Prototypes usually end up in production, don't they? Then develop such prototypes in an agile language and just make them follow their destiny.

What are you doing around Hacker News, if you aren't able to hack the system?

EDIT: However, you should also understand when your language of choice just doesn't fit a gray-suited environment, and indeed I think Ruby doesn't. Python does.

> Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java.

That would be lying though, and it could get you in to a whole pile of hot water. Such 'technical tricks' may work a few times but eventually you'll have a real problem.

It's a matter of semantics. "A Java application" is perfectly honest. Just like when someone says "a native application" it says nothing about if it was actually written in OCaml.

Until the time that HR hires a person to collaborate on your project with 'java' experience and it turns out you wrote your code in clojure.

Stuff like that tends to have consequences, especially when there are contracts and liabilities involved.

Doesn't HR list frameworks along with languages? Is JDK knowledge alone enough to be employed anywhere?

We used to say that Tcl/Tk was a C library with a very complex configuration file ;-)

Excellent!

I've only been on one project where HR was so far divorced from the team executing on a project to hire candidates without us vetting them, and it was (unsurprisingly) a complete disaster.

Also, if you're hiring programmers who can't pick up a new language to work on your project, you're doing it wrong. Most of the capable folks I've worked with loved learning new tech; the problem is usually keeping them from jumping onto a new platform for every project.

You could quote Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming, and say therefor you skipped the error-prone process of increasing complexity-building.

I personally don't think that will be lying. I built a Java app that sets up the environment, starts Rhino and executes the app from there. The Rhino then make calls into Java classes for DB, file access and low level stuff only.

What do I call that solution? "Developed in Java". Here Rhino is to Java what JavaScript is to a HTML web site.

I think the safe way, if you want to follow that policy, is to say you develop for the JRE or for the JVM. Neither of these are lies, but they keep with the original idea of keeping peoples focus on "Java".

You are correct, that's the right way out.

JRE and JVM are technical terms. Unless you are talking to techies, I think "Java technology" and/or "Java platform" are a better choice.

I understand your suspicions: switching perspective is something techies have a difficult time with. Is Arc a language or is it a bunch of macros on top of MzScheme? It depends on how you see it.

Clojure is 100% compatible with Java, both ways in a straightforward manner, so you can easily argue that it's still Java. That's been the smartest design decision ever by its designer.

You have to understand whether your clients are interested either in leveraging the Java technology or employing code-drones. In the former case, Clojure will be fine; in the latter one it will not.

Popular wisdom teaches that most people remember the result, not the way you got it. If you use Clojure and succeed, you'll have your own way.

And my own experience concurs with lelele.

Although it bears more truth than you might think. As of Clojure 1.2, you can implement Java types from Clojure and you could build a plain old Java interface to the system if you needed to. And you'll likely be making use of many standard/community Java libraries.

What makes you say Python is more appropriate for greysuits? Ruby and Python seem very much alike to me.

Google makes him say it ;)

Yeah, Google, for the most part. You are not using an agile language, you are using some of the technology Google relies on, aren't you? ;-)

Google, and beyond it. You could easily have a case for Python: Nokia has made it available for Symbian, Microsoft endorses it via ActiveState, and so on.

My friends, if we want to be effective entrepreneurs, we must learn how to repackage things in a way customers will find attractive. A language can be just a technology, a framework, an application, and so on... whatever concerns your customers. There is no point in being strict about terminology, unless you are selling to savvy techies.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree. There is no reason why my customers need to know in what language the solution is developed in.

Besides, Ruby powers many highly visible websites and web apps. If I'd be losing a sale because I develop in Ruby and NOT Python, chances are I don't want that sale in the first place.

> There is no reason why my customers need to know in what language the solution is developed in.

Business continuity.

Business continuity applies only if we're talking about Java vs Ruby/Python/etc.

If the choice is between Ruby and Python and Clojure and any of the "esoteric" languages as far as enterprises are concerned, that's a red herring.

Let me explain better: Google does not stop at using Python, it embraces and backs it. And every grey suit knows Google.

And any grey suit that deals with the web knows about YellowPages.com which is a Rails site, as is newyorkjets.com.

Google is a compelling argument, no doubt, but if the biz dudes are open to switching from a "traditional" language/framework such as Java/J2EE or .Net, there are other "established" players that use Ruby.

Please don't take this as defending Ruby, the best tool for the job should win out. If the team proposing Python is well-versed in Python, that's what they should go with. But saying that Python is a better bet than Ruby, because Google embraces it is a bit of a strawman.

I don't know what your business is, but if it's consulting or custom development, then you may be wrong. It matters very much to me if I buy something from you that is written in some esoteric language that only a few people can develop for.

Obscure languages are a form of vendor lock-in, in that sense.

if you're developing SAAS or something, then I'm sure you're right, but that argument doesn't apply to everybody.

> Microsoft endorses it via ActiveState

Microsoft has IronPython, and I'm not aware of any existing endorsement of ActivePython from AS. There used to be some partnership or agreement between the two around Python.NET, but that project has been gone for a while now.

In a nutshell: Python actually runs well on Windows, which isn't something you can really say about MRI. (JRuby, maybe, but that brings its own set of issues.)

Linux may have gained real acceptance as a server OS, but businesses overwhelmingly still prefer Windows on the desktop.

When I was at my last company we encountered many a client which considered Java the "alien technology". I remember particularly one of the five largest banks in the world absolutely would not allow the JVM in their data center even if it was on our box. (This was the type of place where it took about a month and 3 or 4 signatures to get a port opened in the local network).

This is completely true and exactly the place I am stuck at. I have a product with major parts in RoR, that the business end user loves but the IT just won't let through. I have to now learn asp.net mvc and port everything over to it. I dread going through that.

"Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually."

It's an uphill battle, but it's not impossible. My last job involved me writing Python for insurance companies. Yeah, there's always someone who won't accept anything that isn't written in .net or Java. But generally speaking, it's only a select few on your customers' team that will even know the difference. For the most part, businesses do actually focus on what's best for their bottom line instead of framework ideology.

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