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Counterpoint Part 4:

Esoteric languages by-nature have smaller populations of devs. They demand higher salaries for their specialist work. This can hurt you as you scale - salaries continue to increase (secularly), and the pool of possible engineers begins to shrink within your locale.

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If you hire developers based on the languages they know / think of languages and stacks as part of the long-term identity of a developer, then you should not use esoteric ones. This is well known! On the other hand significant parts of the industry don’t do the former, so they are free to do the latter.

As an example, nobody knows Go when we hire them to write it.

Yep. This is also true.

Hopefully WFH helps there. In my niche Scala it does. We can hire more broadly. We also hire ppl with an aptitude for Scala and keep our style simple. That helps.

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