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Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

When/how can a company assess that using a particular language is a "competitive advantage"? It seems that the competitive advantage is perhaps in hiring the people who are actually proficient in the language -- and the advantage arises when that language is one that has X, Y, Z paradigms and is designed for A, B, C use cases, and then is used appropriately.

> https://twitter.com/devoncestes/status/1104000439987683328

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I am not advocating for the company but it might be something like this;

Handling of same amount of users comparing to their competitors with a software stack that requires %70 less employees to run will give them enough room to lower their product price comparing to others. Imagine If they can keep it this way X number of years, then they will be able to eliminate their competition.

Minimizing costs like this is most important for commodity software with lots of similar competitors. I think the real answer will vary greatly from company to company and market to market. Generally, I would recommend companies be careful to not think they're all that special. Special companies/products/markets may require special tools, but 99% of companies should pick the most mainstream tools available: Java, .net, c/c++, etc.

Not just the cost, but often the complexity reduction in team communication overhead can mean improvements in the ability to add features and services quickly. Financial arenas deal with a lot of events that need to be processed quickly with complex data transformation requirements that change quarterly in many cases.

Developer maintence time is not the marginal cost/priced of software. Software has low marginal cost to the economics is all about scaling up sales, and your tech stack is mostly binary: the job is either possible or impossible. developer cost within a factor of 10x is irrelevant.

yes, I'd say if a language fits the product for some reason then it's an advantage, but a "competitive advantage" sounds like a stretch. If it's a niche language you want to attract the programmers in a smaller pool so you may as well advertise it.

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