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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I think it's getting harder and harder to justify using anything but the most popular languages and frameworks.

You need a VERY good reason to use anything except TypeScript/C#/Java/Golang/Python/React/Vue/Postgres/MySQL/SQL server/Oracle. Perhaps Rust. These technologies are good enough to get almost anything done these days. There's exceptions of course for example games tend to written in C++ and embedded is often C.

Apart from anything, you should be using these most popular technologies if only for the sake of recruiting.

Using less popular technologies like Erlang/Dart/Kotlin/Ruby/Elixir/OCaml/F# or whatever weird new JavaScript React alternative thing got you interested lately is a bad idea not just for recruiting but for support and community and documentation.

If you are the person deciding which technologies to use, you should probably be using the most mainstream thing you can, not the coolest newest thing that you read on Hacker News. There's any number of companies saddled with their main systems being built in the weird assed framework that the fourth-to-last CTO decided was a good idea, and those companies are now stuck with the problem.

I should note of course that my comments refer to company/organisation development. For personal projects or fun or whatever you should do whatever the heck you enjoy.

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Absurd opinion for an absurd time. Local optimas and stagnation is not how we solve the systemic problems on the internet and in the world.

Sure if your value add is content then go ahead and use mature tools within the paradigm, but if you want to cause a so called "paradigm shift" then you'll need to understand where the progress is happening and what kinds of opportunities it creates.

Ocaml for example is looking more and more enticing. Standard meta language is used by academics and programming language theory is developed in it. Meaning that it has a good long term trajectory (along with lisps I suppose).

Of course we are about to grow out of syntax, soon it'll just be another config param in your editor.. but I don't think these "obvious choices" you list will all be as well positioned w.r.t. that change.

Right now it may be harder to agree with me than with you, but that makes me think of a hn thread I was reading recently where people didn't want to admit to being programmers (in public / to strangers) because the perception is starting to be that what we do is immoral. Sufficient mastery of programming will make it a boring thing that everyone knows how to do but lowering the bar to that point won't happen within the web paradigm we currently inhabit. We'll see if wasm brings us closer but I think it will take more than that.

Anyway, I'd say your advice is good but not great. A CTO should be able to assess which tools fit the problem they have for the timescales they're considering. If they're swayed by your comment (or mine for that matter) then they're not fit for the role. The person you are actually talking to is someone who is building a company that suffers tech while the core business is something else or a company that is meant to be sold to some giant.

If recruiters are any gauge, OCaml is definitely on a bit of an upward trajectory.

> but if you want to cause a so called "paradigm shift" then you'll need to understand where the progress is happening and what kinds of opportunities it creates.

This is the most Hacker News thing I read all year. What are you talking about? Where did he say anything about wanting to cause a paradigm shift?

Startups, the OG focus of HN, typically strive to disrupt the industry with paradigm shifts

And I remember when Python, React, Node were all fringe. Until they disrupted the industry. But the important take away is to choose for a specific reason, and expecting a traction in the future. While OCaml might be good for a research project, it is unrealistic it gives you some future advantage. On the other hand, you can see how Rust can give you an advantage right now for some cases. Or even arguable rescript.

Typically, you should not attempt multiple paradigm shifts simultaneously. In fact, I would argue, the more innovative your end user product is, the more boring your tech stack should be.

Facebook was PHP.

Google was C++.

Bitcoin was C++.

Netflix was Java.

Spend your innovation points on your product, not on programming language.

Facebook was PHP (and then built its own). Google now has Golang (even if they probably still mostly use C++).

Most Telcos, what’s app used Erlang.

Apple used Objective C, and built its own language.

Microsoft used C++… and built a series of languages.

Most of the web programming was in flash… until suddenly JavaScript won out.

Except for Figma which uses WASM based stuff.

Spend innovation points on your product… but sometimes innovative products require innovative ways to built it.

Google is mostly Java and C++, Go has more use outside than on internal projects.

Nokia Networks customers were using a mix of C++ and Perl running on HP-UX back in 2004, and nowadays it is mostly C++ and Java running on Linux distributions. Not every telco is using Siemens Erlang based switches.

Apple created Clascal and Object Pascal, migrated to C++, got Objective C via NeXT acquisition, which previously licensed it from StepStone. They also created Mac Lisp, Hypercard, Dylan and Newtonscript.

Microsoft used BASIC for a looong time, dabbled with Pascal, had one of the best macro assemblers in the market, was the last MS-DOS vendor to actually add C++ support to their C compiler, focused on VB and C++ until .NET came to be.

I agree that the comment you replied to is most accurate for a business that doesn't have tech as a core product, but how many companies can realistically exist just to serve other tech companies? It's a simple fact that there are necessarily far more companies producing some specific product than companies making tools for companies making products

What systemic problems are there that have anything to do with the tech stack? Stuff is fast, featureful, and incredibly secure considering the attack surface is basically everything every person does. The content and applications are the main issues, the tech behind it all is pretty great and getting even better now that industry is finally learning to not tolerate unsafe languages and tools.

I've never in my life done anything that I feel standard languages aren't a good fit for.

I do think Dart deserves full best practices status, because the tooling and ecosystem around it is fantastic, and because it doesn't have a bunch of "Outside the paradigm" stuff, it's all things you can learn in a week coming from Py/JS/etc.

Everything is horrifically slow.

"Everything" is actually not that bad. And what is bad, probably it isn't due to choosing a mainstream compiled language with GC.

I've seen almost no horrific slowness aside from program switching on spinning disks recently. Stuff is pretty fast now, and that mostly useless premature optimization quote is out of fashion so it might even get faster.

I'm not exactly sure what the slowness people talk about is. Even the most bloated of websites are fast.

The one thing that still is an issue is Android load times. It gets a little excited about killing background apps on my phone and will take 10 seconds to open my notetaking app again.

> What systemic problems are there that have anything to do with the tech stack?

Runtime errors.

a hn thread I was reading recently where people didn't want to admit to being programmers (in public / to strangers) because the perception is starting to be that what we do is immoral

any chance you could find and link to that thread?

+1 to that request. If it matters I am computer programmer that also thinks that most of what we do has become immoral by this point.

Maybe the Other Internet article and comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33041355 .

It can be really, really frustrating to work with people and companies with this opinion. I have seen quite a few projects either fail or nearly fail or being slower or less reliable than they should because of the choice to use something like Python, where it was basically the wrong choice from nearly every perspective other than it being what people have heard of.

I'm perfectly happy letting other people work in the middle of the bell curve, but I cry a little inside when I see a super cool application be ruined by highly conservative software thinking. I have never been able to understand that, usually hardware-oriented, companies will be doing something super advanced and novel with physics, engineering, biology, and other "hardware" related things, but then will bury their heads in the sand unless the most common denominator programming language is used because they supposedly can't hire people otherwise. But yet they're perfectly willing to hire and train people on the novel hardware designs. It doesn't add up.

There is a very strange uncomfortability with software ideas that are new to people that I do not see when it comes to even the most novel and cutting-edge hardware-related topics. I have experienced this in internal talks, where hardware-related talks will generate a huge amount of buzz and questions, despite often being well beyond the audience, and the software-oriented talks seem to attract crickets. Honestly, I think it's a bit of hidden hubris, in that many scientists and engineers consider themselves to understand software, and in showing interest in new software-related things, they fear showcasing that they don't know something they fancy themselves as knowing. The other possible answer is that people are just afraid of software in some sense.

I found this in a recent interview where it seemed to be expected to solve a problem using objects and either interfaces or inheritance. I solved the problem with discriminated unions and pattern matching, and there seemed to be some uncomfortability with the solution because it wasn't what they were used to as being the "right answer", when in reality it was just another spot in the solution space of the expression problem.

> I have seen quite a few programs either fail or nearly fail because of the choice to use something like Python

I'm not surprised, it is very difficult to scale Python to larger teams and projects. I mean people have done it to some degree, but at what cost?

It's much better to stick with a static language like Java or C#. You mentioned pattern matching and discriminated unions at the end of your post, which Java has recently gained, and C# to an extent as well.

The projects I have in mind actually struggled even with small teams. Python is not good for anything besides scripting and small programs, what it was originally intended for.

Well, it is good at times for prototyping DSP and ML algorithms. And for embedding in a bigger application for scripting.

Its value decreases swiftly the less glue you require, since that is its real niche.

Granted, I earn my money writing Python code among other things, but surely there have been a few successful Python projects in the past that were more than scripting and small programs.

I usually use Rich Hickey's phrase when dealing with arguments over solutions: "Don't confuse familiarity with simplicity"

It's such an insightful phrase.

This might also applies to code. I have always think that I write simple, readable code but I wonder how much of that is just familiarity to my code style. I typically don't have problem understanding code that I wrote months a go though

That’s a great paraphrase of a sentiment that I have also tried communicating to people. I have tried convincing people that just because something is lesser used doesn’t mean that it isn’t more simple.

In general, people are afraid of simplicity. When you show them a technique or programming language or method or perspective or whatever that is new to them but also simplified the problem, people are inherently bothered that it isn’t as complex as they’re used to, which convinces them that it isn’t a valid solution.

If the only thing that's familiar is Python, then yeah, this approach doesn't scale well.

But mainstream languages also include C++, C#, Go and many others. It's a good thing to have several different tools in your toolbox, but a few tools can cover pretty much any scenario outside of really extreme corner cases (where something like e.g. Prolog might be of use).

> You need a VERY good reason to use anything except TypeScript/C#/Java/Golang/Python/React/Vue/Postgres/MySQL/SQL server/Oracle. Perhaps Rust. These technologies are good enough to get almost anything done these days. There's exceptions of course for example games tend to written in C++ and embedded is often C.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting.

Are we expected to rewrite everything every decade when a new flavor of language comes out?

It seems like, with the exception of Rust, you've named a lot of "lowest common denominator" languages. These languages, while productive, tend to lack expressiveness. It is my opinion that expressiveness is seen as a bad thing in the "professional" community because it takes significant cerebral evolution over the course of a career to learn which tool in the toolbox to use. In other words since the explosion of programming as a career there are more idiots in the proverbial gene pool, and so more companies prefer more idiot-proof languages because the average developer can't help but hurt themselves. This doesn't mean we should prefer "new safe technologies", it means our recruiting should far more stringent and our education far more formal (as in an actual useful programming degree).

I for one would quit if I could program, for example, common lisp and make even 3/4 of my current salary.

Here's, in my opinion, a better and less controversial hot take. Use what works. If you have a team of erlang developers do it in erlang (or whatever). Who cares about the market. If it means spending even more time (and money) learning to write another more popular language correctly it may not be worth the investment. If you build it, they will come. You will have no problem finding an endless stream of developers you can build from the ground up.

As a side note: Kotlin, Ruby, and F# are extremely popular. TIOBE is not a real measure.

> If you have a team of erlang developers do it in erlang (or whatever). Who cares about the market

As an IC, I care about the market. I go to work exclusively to exchange my labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. When it was time to change jobs as your bog standard enterprise dev, it was much easier to throw my resume in the air and get a job offer by being an experienced C# developer than it would have been if I had spent three years writing software in Erlang.

And most job interviews outside of tech companies where most developers work are not going to be language agnostic nor are they going to have you reversing binary trees on the whiteboard while juggling bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.

As a reformed former dev lead, why would I hire an Erlang developer when I could throw a rock and hit a good enough C#/Java JavaScript/React developer to push out some CRUD SaaS app or line of business app?

Because the average Erlang developer is probably a better developer than the average in those languages and still quite capable of writing in any of those languages, at least with a little study and practice.

Are we really to believe that the average Javascript developer is going to be able to be dropped in an Erlang shop (or any of the other "weird" languages) and be productive any time soon?

The “language” is the easy part. Every language has an ecosystem around it and foot guns and best practices and frameworks. Take C# for instance, sure the language is decently easy. But, the first and third party frameworks around it are huge.

I’m sure I could (re)learn Java that I haven’t touched since shortly after it was first introduced in the 90s in a few weeks. That doesn’t mean I would be a competent Android developer.

The average JavaScript developer would be an idiot to ever step foot in Erlang shop if he knew what was good for his career.

My resume was sacrosanct when I was in the enterprise dev world until mid 2020. Why would I reduce my optionality by not using the most marketable technologies?

> That doesn’t mean I would be a competent Android developer.

Sure you will. There’s no “Android developer”, there’s Java/Kotlin developer who uses Android SDK.

And I assure you that someone who needs an Android app written wouldn’t care about your distinction or are you claiming that a Java developer who never wrote an application for Android would be just as effective as one who had?

Who would you rather lead the development of your Android app? Someone with no experience with Android or someone with previous experience.

I’ll absolutely pick competent Java developer who never touched a line of Android over mediocre “Android” developer.

And how do you think that would work out if you’re hiring a lead developer to oversee a team who is trying to release an Android app?

That depends on the team leader and how well they can take suggestions. It's a team, not everyone will have the same background and, probably, nor would it be best that they did.

So if the team lead that I’m hiring to be the subject matter expert can’t be the go to person for technical solutions based on relevant experience in the domain, who should it be?

A team lead does not need to be:

a) the most experienced amongst the team in any particular language

b) the most experienced amongst the team in any particular domain

c) the go-to person for any particular problem

The whole point of a team is to cover several different sets of knowledge and experience because no one person can know it all or do it all. A leader does their best to enable this collective to produce the best it can.

Leaders know this.

It seems like a case of different incentives for different people.

If the incentive is to ship product then choosing the language you already have a team for makes the most sense.

If you are choosing based on hiring a new team, then the current flavors work. 20 years ago that was Java. Today it's C#. 20 years from now it'll be something else.

If you are a developer looking to grow a resume for the next job, then it's a double-edged sword. Sure it's easier to get a C# gig. But it pays less because you're in a bigger pool. It's harder to stand out. Conversely it's harder to get say a Cobol gig. But it's easier to build a profile in the Cobol community (simply by being under 80 years old) and there is a Lot of work around, and is very well paid.

Equally something that's marginally popular now will have a long tail and can be very lucrative. Erlang might be obscure, but there are plenty of shops who would love to pick up another experienced, capable, erlang developer. You're a bigger fish in a smaller pond.

So yeah, language is like most things, dependant on your point of view. That's why we gave so many of them.

20 years ago, Java was already becoming pretty big in the enterprise. Today there are plenty of Java jobs from your bog standard banks and insurance companies all the way up to the BigTech companies. The biggest ponds don’t have fish using Erlang.

BTW, what languages do you think all of those BigTech companies that pay well are using?

I just keep bringing up C# because that’s the language I have the most experience with. But substitute $any popular language.

Certainly not C#, lol.

Even OCamls share would be bigger within big tech, thanks to Meta.

I work in BigTech now. In the last two years I’ve done projects in C#, Java, Go, Python and Typescript…

C# is much bigger then OCaml. Even F# is bigger than OCaml!

(and I say this as a big fan of OCaml)

> within big tech

I saw that and C# is still bigger, largely due to Microsoft.

Erlang might be slightly more obscure, but there are plenty of big household names using the language - Klarna, Bet365, and William Hill are all household names. And that's excluding the obvious cases of Ericsson or WhatsApp.

Except for WhatsApp, from what I can find on Levels, all of the companies you named pay on the low end of even enterprise dev salaries.

I don't think it's always easy. it's been quite a struggle becoming proficient in Haskell, just drinking from the firehose of type theory you need to get things done.

also note that Jane Street does everything in OCaml. I can't believe it's bad for their employees' careers. probably because they're not looking for the same jobs as the average JavaScript pleb.

The language is only easy if you have basically learned the language already. Java, C#, C++, Python, Go etc. all differ but fundamentally they are all the same language with different amounts of window dressing. So yeah if you know one of them it's easy to "learn" the others. But I wouldn't really call this learning a new language.

It's a fundamentally different ask to learn Haskell, datalog, SaC. You are actually learning a new language instead of just the flavour of the week imperative programming.

If the language is the hard part, something is wrong with it. Usually. I've seen and user a whole slew of opinionated languages, and they almost always have a big chunk of problems they will be awkward to use for, or even almost insoluble. Every succesful one supports multiple programming paradigms, better or worse, usually decently.

Now the real stuff that can cause problems is bad tooling and lack of support. You cannot code your things when you're trying to fix the compiler, build tools or the debugger.

The last time I had a job where I only had to learn “the language” to be effective was 1999 programming in C and FORTRAN on VAX and Stratus mainframes. By 2000, “knowing C or C++” didn’t do any good without knowing MFC, COM, etc.

What good is a language in 2022 without a complete ecosystem of frameworks for most jobs?

Even esoteric languages have a relative complete ecosystem of frameworks. I use Haskell in my day job and I never had issues finding a library.

Haskell is not particularly esoteric, but heavily opinionated.

Libraries cannot change that basic fact - there are just problems it will be extremely unsuited for.

Java has some of the same problem by the way in reverse. (Package handling, forced garbage collection and unknown real time and memory usage characteristics.) The difference being that Java's core has much less important opinions about algorithms, while Haskell tries to make everything functional or it is awkward.

So, while Haskell will be hard to use for problems best described in an imperative way (in addition to other issues say Java has), Java will only have serious problems where memory and runtime determinism are paramount.

It so happens that a lot of the programming is done in imperative way. Including the libraries.

Say I’m developing an application that needs to interact with cloud services.

The last time the third party Haskell SDK for AWS was updated was in 2014. I do see a third party GCP SDK. But if GCP and Azure works like AWS, as soon as a new API is released by a service team, all of the officially supported SDKs automatically get updated.

I am sure there are other service providers that have SDKs and code samples for popular languages.

I would assume it's just a REST service which has an openapi spec. Then you can just generate the client.

How much more “productive” do you think they would be just by being able to import a module in any of the supported languages?

https://aws.amazon.com/developer/tools/

I believe the list for GCP and Azure are about the same. What are the chances that your problem is such a special snowflake that it can’t be solved with one of those languages? What are the chances that any new developer could ramp up faster or already knows Boto3 (the AWS SDK for Python)? If they have an issue, they can go to StackOverflow or raise a ticket with their TAM.

Which would have more assurances are designed correctly, the one from the vendor or yours? I was able to take advantage of new APIS for one of AWS services the day it was introduced, no need to waste cycles on creating my own wrapper. Creating a wrapper around my cloud providers APIS, “doesn’t make the beer taste better”

AWS’s SDKs automatically take care of retries, exponential back offs, wrapping the APIs to be idiomatic including logical exceptions being thrown, any underlying changes, etc.

> How much more “productive” do you think they would be just by being able to import a module in any of the supported languages?

The same language? Maybe a few % considering a client is a small part of what you need to create. A different language? Depends on the comparison. I would be tens to hundreds % more efficient in Haskell then in Go or Python.

> I believe the list for GCP and Azure are about the same. What are the chances that your problem is such a special snowflake that it can’t be solved with one of those languages?

Of course it can be solved in those languages. I can also solve it in Assembly or brainfuck with enough elbow grease. What matters is speed of implementation and correctness. With the exception of Rust all these language have debilitating flaws.

> Which would have more assurances are designed correctly, the one from the vendor or yours? I was able to take advantage of new APIS for one of AWS services the day it was introduced, no need to waste cycles on creating my own wrapper. Creating a wrapper around my cloud providers APIS, “doesn’t make the beer taste better”

> AWS’s SDKs automatically take care of retries, exponential back offs, wrapping the APIs to be idiomatic including logical exceptions being thrown, any underlying changes, etc.

Did you ever try openapi generated clients? They can handle retries and exponential backoffs as well. There is no design to be done here. It just exposes the API as designed.

None of the cloud providers provide the internal specifications used to autogenerate the SDKs for the languages I listed. In the case of Boto3 (the Python AWS SDK), while there are one to one generated mappings from the spec, there are also higher level constructs for the most popular services like S3 and DynamoDB and also helper functions like Waiters for asynchronous operations where you need to poll for an operation to be complete and Pagers that handle get request where the requests are being polled. Sure you could do all of this yourself. But again, “does it make the beer taste better”?

This isn’t meant to be a rah rah AWS is the bees knees. It’s just the cloud provider I know the best (and the one I work for), I’m sure knowing MS, the developer experience is just as good as AWS. I just don’t have experience with it.

> Of course it can be solved in those languages. I can also solve it in Assembly or brainfuck with enough elbow grease. What matters is speed of implementation and correctness. With the exception of Rust all these language have debilitating flaws.

What’s the old saying about it’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools? If you can’t be productive in any of the nine languages that are popular enough to be supported by the major cloud providers, does that say more about the tools or the craftsmen?

The latest update to Amazonka (the Haskell library for AWS) was 3 hours ago.

https://github.com/brendanhay/amazonka

I use the package directly from GitHub in my project.

I would be more likely to hire a JS dev if they have Elixir experience not less, but I am not in the enterprise world.

Work is not only about money for me. My best work environments have been a small team of skilled people tackling a big problem. For this we would use whatever is the best tool for the job, regardless of its outside popularity.

From my experience the shops using esoteric languages aren't recruting based on knowledge of a specific tool. They're hunting for very experienced candidates. It's assumed you'll learn the language. Knowledge of a specific language does not necessarily mean you're a good developer.

And why would an “experienced candidate” ever step foot in those shops when they could easily get a job using a more marketable language that probably paid just as much and would make it easier for them to get their next job?

I personally would be hesitant to hire someone who only listed popular technologies on their resume. I’d be worried they would suggest using technologies that improve their resume rather than ones that are good for my business.

Your business is probably not a special snowflake and probably would be served by using the most popular relevant technology. It would be much easier to recruit and to find help.

I personally hate the clusterfuck of the modern front end ecosystem and would avoid it like the plague. But, if I was responsible for choosing the framework to use, I would choose React any day just for recruitment reasons.

Because that "marketable language" is dull and frustrating?

If you want top talent then you've got to offer something they want; sure you can always pay more, but past a certain point that might not be enough, plus it gets expensive. Using better languages is one of the most effective ways to get noticed by the candidates you really want.

Python, TypeScript, C#, Rust, Golang - none of these seem dull to me, though all languages have some frustration.

Having used Scala, I don't think I could go back to any of those. Maybe Rust but even then I'd be constantly chafing at the lack of HKT.

4 years of golang always breaking in prod and constant copy pasting was both dull and extremely stressfull.

Only Rust and TypeScript might be considered non dull, maybe C#. Python and Golang are as dull as they go.

I work with Python. It's extremely dull and frustrating.

It’s more frustrating to want to leave a job and not be able to find one quickly because your experience is in some obscure language.

When I was in the Enterprise/Corp dev world until a couple of years ago, I could call a few recruiters and have 8 interviews and two or three offers within less than a month. It’s easy to pattern match when you use a popular technology.

Ehh maybe. Sure, if you use a bland corporate language then you can pick up a bland corporate job whenever you want. But what's bland corporate job B going to give you that bland corporate job A didn't?

More money?

Or even the same amount of money when the pay/bullshit ratio starts going in the wrong direction.

You realize all of the BigTech companies use the same “boring languages” don’t you?

> You realize all of the BigTech companies use the same “boring languages” don’t you?

What kind of argument is that? Of course they do, you can’t get away from using JS for front, for example.

But they also use Ocaml, Haskell, Scala.

Taking a dull job so that it's easier to change to a better paying dull job doesn't seem like a great tradeoff to me. Bullshit definitely happens but again, dealing with a crappy language's bullshit from day 1 so that it's easier for me to switch to another job that will definitely have at least that floor level of bullshit doesn't feel like a great option.

The biggest companies largely use dull languages, sure, although you sometimes find pockets within them that are doing something at least a little nicer (e.g. OCaml at Facebook). So much the worse for the big companies.

You saw my original spiel about going to work to exchange labor for money? I don’t go to work to find excitement. I go to work to provide food and shelter.

My excitement during the first decade of my career came from my working hobby as a fitness instructor and running with friends. In less than a month my “excitement” is going to come from my wife and I living out of two suitcases flying across the country staying in mid tier hotels for a few years.

I could spend my free time learning a new programming language. But I am finding it much more “exciting” learning Spanish so when we stay in Mexico for a few weeks, I can at least be able to communicate somewhat.

If you want a job you can easily switch for an equivalent job, which seemed to be your pitch for using a boring language, then that job is at best going to be a 9-5, which will take up something like half your waking life (at least for the decades when you're the most healthy). I'm a big believer in life and hobbies outside of work (and when I want to learn a new programming language, I look for a way to do it on the clock), but an engaging, interesting job that pays less is often a very worthwhile tradeoff.

I just left a job two years ago that literally paid $100K less than I make now. I am a lot more engaged now…

Not bragging, it’s about what a mid level developer makes at most of the large tech companies.

I definitely couldn’t have afforded my current adventure at my old job nor could I have afforded to retire my wife.

I went the other direction. Took a job that paid half as much as my previous one, but it's interesting work, and I'm a lot happier. Grass is always greener I guess.

Because comp is similar and it's fun. Plus I fail to see how working in a less popular language hurts future job prospects. If anything my experience with less popular languages usually leads to a fairly lively, informal discussion during interviews.

Because when you throw your resume out there and a hiring manager is looking for a “full stack developer who knows (Java || C# || Python) && Typescript” why would he choose you over someone who could hit the ground running and add immediate value?

To be fair I have no idea about the full stack life. I, however, am also not convinced they add "immediate" value. Once you're beyond mid-level being a so-called generalist is not as useful. Most of my work at high senior, and now staff level requires actual deep knowledge of the preferred stack. I have yet to meet a reformed full stack developer in our ranks and there are tons we hire, and even more that come through the door.

I don’t touch the front end development. But I am very much a “generalist”.

- back end development in a few popular languages

- about an average “data architect” for lack of a better word. I’ve led implementations on every type of database imaginable including ETL type jobs and online systems.

- “DevOps” (at least if you give me an AWS account) including setting up networking infrastructure, logging, monitoring, CI/CD, etc.

I’ve led plenty of pre-sales meetings, writing SOWs, pretty PowerPoint slides and architecture diagrams etc.

The “generalist” is very useful when you need someone to lead projects and to understand how everything fits together. I’ve had to wear all of the above hats at startups. Now I wear those same hats at a cloud provider I’m sure you have heard of. I specifically targeted my current position because I wanted to be a generalist.

I’m no special snowflake. Many of my coworkers who came up the ranks in startups and have similar experience can do the same.

Probably because I'm competent and there is more to adding value than memorizing specific tech. I can't speak to your experience, but as far as mine goes I've never had a problem landing a job.

I'm zero worried about it as it's never been an issue.

So how fast do you think you could get up to speed enough to lead a project creating an Android app if you have no experience in the stack?

If you’re being hired to lead developers and projects, don’t you think you need to know the technology you’re leading?

perhaps because it was discerned that he is the better programmer in general.

Because I also have prior experience in those and other languages.

I have “prior experience” in any many languages. But I know the ecosystem has changed to the point where someone who has recent experience would be more valuable. That would be like me (hypothetically) saying I had prior experience in JavaScript from a decade ago and I can write JQuery with the best of them.

An organization that prefers ecosystem knowledge to deep knowledge and ecosystem familiarity hints at poor planning and needing someone to "hit the ground running" to fix their mistakes.

I'd pass on such a position.

Also you talk about only having experience in a less popular language as a death sentence.

I've been only writing Haskell professionally for a decade, but I get endless amounts of interview invites for prior experience.

Out of curiosity I went through some of the better invitations interview process and had no issue getting offers either.

If anything mentioning my professional Haskell experience gets me an offer faster no matter the positions requirements.

If a company is looking for senior developers who are to serve as team leads and lead initiatives, why would they hire someone without previous experience in the technology? I’m sure you could eventually get up to speed. But the reason I haven’t had to do a coding interview in well over a decade of working at companies from your standard Corp dev jobs, to companies where they wanted a “tiger team” to lead green field initiatives, to a startup where the then new CTO was looking for someone to lead “cloud native projects” to my current job in the cloud consulting department at BigTech is because I knew the ecosystem well.

When I spoke to CxOs and directors, they wanted someone with a proven track record that could solve their problems. When I was being hired as a dev lead to lead junior C# developers he inherited, what would he look like hiring someone who knew Haskell?

How was i suppose to go from an empty git repo to a fully fleshed out MVP or later from an empty AWS account to infrastructure, CI/CD, to a fully fledged out MVP if I didn’t have prior experience?

If someone is looking to create a new iOS app. Who should they hire? Someone with iOS experience or someone with Erlang experience?

Language culture is a thing. I’d rather be surrounded by competent functional programmers than Java developers.

Conversely, if you spent 3 years writing Erlang, you are suddenly not one of a hundreds of thousands of candidates, but a part of a much smaller pool, and having an expertise in a semi-esoteric language along whatever mainstream languages you know is a strong signal that you’re not just an average bear.

It also means you’re competing in a much smaller market and people looking for strong Erlang developers will be suddenly very interested in you specifically, because it’s tough to find strong candidates with this expertise.

It also might mean (depending on your interests) that positions that are open are in a more intellectually interesting problem space, because boring problems tend to be solved in the lowest common denominator languages, and if an unusual language is chosen, it might be chosen because it’s a being used in a unique context.

Yes I’m sure all of the large tech companies are solving boring problems using popular languages.

Ok, but do you really think you’d have a hard time finding work with your xx years of experience, regardless of what language you have been most recently working in?

As in, reductio ad absurdum, “if only I had been working in Java, I’d be safe, but because I worked in Ruby, I am going have to go flip burgers, as no one will let me near their precious production code now?”

I mean, yeah, ok, there was the dotcom bust, and I suppose another could happen at any point, but somehow I get the impression that you’re arguing that using any language except the most mainstream option (whatever that might be for a given industry) is too risky? Or am I misreading?

Well, I wouldn’t have a hard time finding a job in my current speciality cloud architect/cloud dev because of where I work and what I do. No one would ignore my resume.

But in the boring enterprise dev world where I came from especially during the latter part where I was specifically being hired to lead initiatives, of course they wanted someone with relevant experience.

Yes they are.

Sure, but you're not really disagreeing with me.

Idiot proof languages are popular. If you want assured money learn an idiot proof LCD language. In fact, everyone should have one in their tool belt to put food on the table.

However, if you're actually a talented engineer these languages will hamstring you and your art. You will probably eventually gravitate to something more heady (such as the less popular languages) and probably even leave your nice cushy gig to give a professional life in that stack a shot. This isn't, however, to say talented engineers don't exist in lowest common denominator language pools. It's just esoteric/less-used languages tends to cause the best quality of talent to come from them owing from many of their problems. If you can be proficient and productive in a language that you can't easily google a solution for, you're probably an excellent candidate for promotion into the higher echelons.

This is a similar phenomenon to editor choice. My anecdata in a little over 10 years of a career has given me the impression that I can tell what kind of developer someone is by their editor. People who use raw vim/emacs tend to better developers. Why? It's not the editor itself. It's that these editors pull no punches and require time and expertise. That dedication is not taught. The easier an editor is to use for a beginner, the more average a programmer tends to be. Again, there are a lot of very talented developers using VSCode or full blown IDEs. But with those editors your signal to noise ratio is quite low. It's anecdata but mixed with the information above you can gather a lot of "metadata" about a person without much effort.

It's like the equivalent of judging a carpenter for using power tools because he's just not dedicated and gritty enough to use a manual twist drill.

My anecdata, people who overly focus on language and tools tend to be the worse developers. It's the developers that effectively address the universal problems of writing software people want to use, like api usability, reliability, data consistency, maintainability that have the most props in my book. The best developers I've known weren't particularly attached to any editor, language, or framework.

> It's like the equivalent of judging a carpenter for using power tools because he's just not dedicated and gritty enough to use a manual twist drill.

Serious question: all else equal and without any additional information, between two carpenters who produced the same output in the same time, one with power tools the other without, is there any reason whatsoever to assume one of them is any better than the other?

Like in the good old days, you take a shot, and let their work speak for themselves, if you got it wrong, well that's life.

My question was not answered. In that scenario you have access to the work both of them do, so it speaks for itself, and it is equivalent work done in equivalent time. Use or non-use of power tools is the only difference. Do you factor that in your judgement or you flip a coin when choosing an employee or supplier?

You misunderstood my reply, it was flip a coin and let their work speak for themselves, after being hired.

Okay, so this means it's not relevant to you which is... an interesting take. I guess you better operate your business in at-will employment legal landscape (and not feel bad for your employees' families after you fire them left and right this way).

For me I would definitely make use of this extra information before hiring. Hiring a carpenter who's able to work with power tools is likely better, unless I need to foresee a situation where they must work without electricity. Even if they are physically fit, power tools can enable a human to do something not possible at all with bare hands.

For a programmer it's the reverse, if we assume "power tool" is an "easy" language compared to something like OCaml, or maybe tools like VS Code and Copilot compared to vim. These tools don't help overcome a physical limitation, like the power tools of a carpenter, but a mental one. Being able to set up vim fully to be as productive and produce as few bugs as someone with VS Code, or being able to pick up Haskell without being able to immediately get a human answer your every question, exemplifies the type of higher-level skills and learning capability that is the primary value of a human employee compared to a robot.

In other words, in context of this discussion, the equivalent of carpenter's power tools might be much closer to Haskell + bespoke vim/tmux setup than JavaScript + VSC.

No, drilling holes doesn't make you a good carpenter, use the most convenient tool you have available. Designing a good chair that people want to sit in then producing it from idea to reality does.

I'd think manual carpenter is going to have to retire early due to repetitive strain injury.

Same but for a different reason. Being able to overcome the learning curve and become comfortable using power tools to achieve equivalent results makes you a valuable employee as a human, it raises you to a higher level of control and increases your capabilities beyond what you could do with bare hands. (The only benefit of being capable without power tools is if there's no electricity for example. IANAC)

The same with "easy"/mainstream languages: something like OCaml/Haskell/Nim/Nix/etc. is a power tool with a steeper learning curve compared to something like Python/JavaScript/shell scripting; you being able (and willing) to handle it without abundance of learning resources says something about your mental capacity and potential value as an employee.

This is like one (non tech) company that I was hired at as a dev lead where they were about to embark on writing an “address validation module”. I quickly put an end to the entire project and worked with a vendor to license CASS software.

Companies pay employees to add business value. Not to get into their own flights of fancy to do things the hard way. As you mature, you learn only to focus on things that “make the beer taste better”.

I have yet to see an argument by any of the proponents of “obscure” languages where their choice adds business value.

And the “hard problems” that are being solved by the large companies at a scale that has never been solved are doing so by using mainstream languages.

I’ve never seen a report of a job interview where they asked you to reverse a binary tree in Erlang.

The vast majority of problems that developers are being asked to solve are not that hard technically. They are business problems.

I mean more having learned to be productive in an obscure language as a positive marker regarding your mental capacity, intrinsic motivation, autonomy and initiative. If you then insist on using it for everything, business value be damned, that is a red flag. Choosing an obscure language to tickle your fancy would be negative value to me as a business owner since I need to hire and maintain a team of developers who are all comfortable and proficient in it. However, there are circumstances in which an obscure language might just be the right tool for the job (and overall architecture that can accommodate a small cohesive component written in a different language has its benefits).

You think it’s a red flag for a business to hire people who can add business value?

I’m motivated to get up everyday for the same reason most people are - money.

I bet you’re looking for people with “passion” and who are willing to consistently put in more than 40 hours a week aren’t you? Out of all the millions of things I can do and have done in my free time over my career (including a working hobby as a part time fitness instructor back in my younger days an avid runner and a weightlifter) spending more time sitting at a computer outside of work isn’t one of them.

And the obscure language would hardly ever outweigh the need to recruit developers easily.

> You think it’s a red flag for a business to hire people who can add business value?

Where have you seen that?

> I’m motivated to get up everyday for the same reason most people are - money.

You are quite mistaken. Once they have enough to exist comfortably, people tend to seek meaning not money. The emergence of OSS ecosystem is the best example -- a lot of it, including the most popular OS in the world, came about as hobby projects people did in their spare time. If you're a software engineer, I bet you use products of their passion a lot in your money-making activities.

> I bet you’re looking for people with “passion” and who are willing to consistently put in more than 40 hours a week aren’t you?

Again, all else equal, if I need to make a decision as to who would be a better, more capable employee in absence of other information, the one who managed to be productive in an obscure language would be higher on my list. Just that. Everything else, making people work overtime, etc., is your addition.

> people tend to seek meaning not money. The emergence of OSS ecosystem is the best example -- a lot of it, including

Look at a list of who the largest contributors are to Linux.

https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/

Most of the contributors are getting paid to do so.

Do you really think most of the 2.7 million developers in the US are contributing to open source?

Absolutely the case now, but not quite how these things tend to get started.

Regarding how many in the US contribute, I don't know the stats... Could probably be more if work-life balance/employment security was better.

Read about the “Dark Matter Developers”

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

> It's like the equivalent of judging a carpenter for using power tools because he's just not dedicated and gritty enough to use a manual twist drill.

I think this is an apt analogy. Mostly because carpenters who use hand tools produce more beautiful, unique works of art. When everything you do is on rails (no pun intended) you don't have the flexibility or creativity to make works of art. It's like saying Ikea tables (the equivalent of an idiot proof language) are just as nice to look at and functional as a purpose-driven hand crafted table. I have my doubts, despite using Ikea when I "just need something done".

Nice one, being it elucidates the art being lost in other fields (and perhaps all over).

Your analogy doesn't make sense. There's nothing about the programming languages you consider "least common denominator" that lock you into a specific design, unlike your Ikea table. Actually those LCD programming languages are generally the least opinionated in how you use them.

> Idiot proof languages are popular. If you want assured money learn an idiot proof LCD language.

You saw that whole spiel about my desire to exchange my labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter?

> However, if you're actually a talented engineer these languages will hamstring you and your art.

I have no desire to be a starving artist. I turn requirements into code so businesses with money will give me some of it by adding business value. I don’t program to create the next Picasso.

I stopped considering programming “fun” after doing it for 10 years across 4 assembly languages (65C02, 68K, PPC, x86) before I graduated from college in 1996.

> and probably even leave your nice cushy gig to give a professional life in that stack a shot

So tell me again why I would leave my “cushy gig” (and it is the cushiest gig you can imagine in any BigTech company)?

> you can be proficient and productive in a language that you can't easily google a solution for, you're probably an excellent candidate for promotion into the higher echelons.

Every single leveling guideline I have seen at any tech company doesn’t mention “ability to code in an esoteric language well”. It’s all about “scope”, “impact”, “managing ambiguity”, etc. “Coding ability” really only comes into play from junior to mid. After that it is about system design even at the interviews.

> I stopped considering programming “fun” after doing it for 10 years across 4 assembly languages (65C02, 68K, PPC, x86) before I graduated from college in 1996.

this makes me sad to hear. I fell in love with programming at age 7 and still love it at 32. I'm extremely fortunate to enjoy something that pays well, rather than languishing at a cushy job that leaves me empty.

> Every single leveling guideline I have seen at any tech company don’t mention “ability to code in an esoteric language well”. It’s all about “scope”, “impact”, “managing ambiguity”, etc. “Coding ability” really only comes into play from junior to mid. After that it is about system design even at the interviews.

if you're hiring plumbers, sure. it's not all plumbing, though. there's algorithm design, compiler engineering, formal verification, program synthesis, numerical methods, etc. etc.

the really effective people in those fields use (or make) weird languages. Isabelle's written in HOL, Coq in OCaml, Agda in Haskell. having a knack for weird languages is a plus for brainy jobs working on that kind of stuff.

> I'm extremely fortunate to enjoy something that pays well, rather than languishing at a cushy job that leaves me empty.

My job paying well allowed my wife to buy a vacation home/investment property for the winter and starting at the end of the month fly around the country and stay in mid tier hotels and do the whole “digital nomad thing”.

I spent the first fifteen years out of college having a great time outside of work as a part time fitness instructor (more of hobby) and training and running with friends.

Sure I’m learning a new language now - Spanish.

It's very good and healthy to have a life outside of work, but you're still going to spend anywhere between 25 to 60 hours a week working.

Making sure that you actually enjoy those hours has a massive impact on your quality of life.

For an extreme example, what pay cut would you be willing to take if you were able to do fitness training full-time?

> My job paying well allowed my wife to buy a vacation home/investment property for the winter and starting at the end of the month fly around the country and stay in mid tier hotels and do the whole “digital nomad thing”.

This is somewhat off-topic and I don't know you or your wife personally, but I find it flabbergasting that a spouse would choose to do the "digital nomad thing" when their partner can't or won't follow them. Even more so when they're being bankrolled by said partner.

When I said “my wife” I meant “my wife and I”. I work remotely.

I feel this is true. If a person has a few esoteric languages under their belt it says a lot about their drive and passion. If anything if I wanted to find talented devs I would put some more esoteric languages on the requirements lists even if we wouldn't use those languages internally. It's a pretty effective filter.

Why do I feel like when you want developers with “passion” you wouldn’t be satisfied with developers who want to put 40 hours a week in and go home?

No, it's not about the hours. A developer with passion is more likely to be highly skilled.

So where do they gain that passion if not from developing off hours?

If you look at the leveling or hiring guidelines for any major tech company, what separates “senior developers” and up from mid level developers are system design, “handling ambiguity”, leadership, “scope”, “impact” and in the case of Google did you write a messaging app.

Even the largest tech companies realize “coding ability” only gets you so far and most developers who want to get ahead would be far better off focusing on the other aspects of software engineering.

System design, handling ambiguity, scope and impact are all things that are taught extremely well by just coding a lot. I'm not even sure why you are arguing. Someone who does something more and likes doing it in general will be better at it then someone who spends less time on it and doesn't like it.

So how do you learn “system design” - infrastructure, proper data storage for the problem domain, balancing the trade offs between costs, RPO and RTO, security, caching, sharding to handle scale, scaling, disaster recovery or the stereotypical “how would you design Twitter” System Design tech interview.

Coding has little to do with handling ambiguity.

While I have never been through a BigTech coding interview, I have been through (and passed) a BigTech system design interview, it has little to do with coding.

Designing (and redesigning) systems for large organizations is my $DayJob where I have to be able to explain those concepts.

> However, if you're actually a talented engineer these languages will hamstring you and your art.

Early in my career I thought of software as art. I was wrong.

The very last thing I want in any production software team is an artist looking to express themselves. I want the worlds most talented engineers who want to use consistent proven methods to create solid maintainable code with zero surprises.

Code as art has its place, granted, but that place is in the privacy of your own time in a repository with one single contributor. I occasionally still go back to writing lisp for fun, but it has no place in production.

There is the meaning of "art" as "craft" too, and i think this was the intended meaning in the quote you use.

Perhaps it's just a generalization, but I don't think there's such a clear separation between "code as art" and "code as engineering".

The very best engineers are like artists, in that they harness their creativity to solve problems efficiently and effectively, often in innovative and personal ways.

And artists who are respected in the field of software can use consistent methods to produce solid maintainable code. I wouldn't say "zero surprises" though, I'm often surprised by reading the code of an artist, how they achieve extraordinary results with mundane code that a child can understand.

The example that comes to mind is Fabrice Bellard. He's one of the most talented engineers - and I'm sure many of us would agree that his software is a work of art.

Well, as someone who has to manage a team, I completely agree that what's needed are engineers who can consistently produce predictable results. We don't want someone who chooses (or worse, creates!) an esoteric language to pursue their art. But I myself am of the latter persuasion, "writing lisp for fun". And having a team of only non-artistic engineers would be so boring. But then again, boring is what we need most of the time.

> The very best engineers are like artists, in that they harness their creativity to solve problems efficiently and effectively

As a reformed former dev lead, I wanted a consistent industry standard idiomatic method of writing code and I used a combination of static analysis tools and code reviews to establish a culture to do just that.

I don’t want my C# developers who came from Java writing an AbstractFactoryFacadeBeanProxyDecaratorSingleton.

“Fun” for me is doing anything except being in front of a computer after hours. Between time with my wife, exercise, learning Spanish and just vegging out, computers are the last thing on my mind. I don’t even have a personal computer anymore.

> Code as art has its place, granted, but that place is in the privacy of your own time in a repository with one single contributor. I occasionally still go back to writing lisp for fun, but it has no place in production.

That reminds me of an excerpt from this humorous (but still relatable) bit of writing: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

> Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

> This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.

> Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they’re told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers’ snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.

I would like to see any form of objective evidence for “if you're actually a talented engineer these languages will hamstring you and your art”.

Even in C that lacks any form of sane abstraction capabilities, people have come up with object systems and what not if they fit a problem domain better. While I think that the language optimum is well past C, there is no significant difference between modern managed languages in any way besides ecosystems — and that is the most important thing.

Speaking of C the canonical way to do it was to create a struct with function pointers and initialize the struct as you would a class.

> C#/Java JavaScript/React developer to push out some CRUD SaaS app or line of business app?

Because of this: "The Python Paradox" [1].

Replace Python (which has become mainstream in the meantime) with any other "weird" language from the article and I think the point still stands.

If it matters I had started learning Python just about when this article was being written/published, and in my early to mid-career that advice of using a "weird" language (Python, at the time) was really good for me, got me into a couple of small companies where I really enjoyed working.

Granted, now I'm already over 40 years of age with a mortgage to pay, I'm a little more flexible when it comes to the technologies being used (even though I would cry myself to work in the early hours of morning were I to use Java, and I'm not kidding), but for people who are quite early in their careers letting them explore and use those "weird" languages will still do them a lot of good in terms of them enjoying their programming work, they might even land on a forum written in Arc.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

People early in their career are the last ones that should do anything in obscure languages. Most of the time the biggest leap in salary comes in your first few years. Once you break the can’t get a job <-> don’t have experience cycle, you need to be able to jump ship.

When I first started in my career over two and a half decades ago, my focus was on being able to be aligned with the market and being able to support myself. I was young, single, had no responsibilities and just moved to a major city. The last thing I considered “fun” was programming.

That's the thing, it's not only about the salary.

Yes, you leave money on the table if you do that (I know I did, I have friends the same age as me who earn a lot more than I do because they went the non-obscure language path early in their career), but at the same time you also bring some purpose into your professional life, which cannot be entirely bought with money.

Or maybe I was the weak one when I didn't see myself programming in something like Java for a living for my entire career (30 to 40 years), again, that would have literally caused me to cry before going to work, in which case, yes, those persons that can surpass that type of feeling should definitely go for the "more money/less interesting programming stuff" route.

Well, I restarted my career in 2008 after staying at my second job for 9 years and becoming an “expert beginner” - I was doing VB6 (discontinued in 2001) and C++/MFC (Windows). After the struggle I had finding another job when I was ready to leave, I said never again. I completely concentrated on technologies that were marketable.

By 2016, I knew I didn’t want to be “just a developer”. I enjoyed working with customers, leading projects, mentoring and teaching. But I still wanted to stay hands on

I belatedly discovered “the cloud” and realized I wanted to specialize in true “Devops” bringing developers and operations together and working with companies to show their developers how to be “cloud native” (application modernization)

When $BigTech came calling about a pure software engineer position, I really wasn’t interested. I kept talking to the recruiter and she told me about a cloud consulting position where I would be able to be involved in the full life cycle from pre-sales, to delivering a finished product including infrastructure. I jumped at the chance.

> This doesn't mean we should prefer "new safe technologies", it means our recruiting should far more stringent and our education far more formal (as in an actual useful programming degree).

I think the ironic thing here is that these "approved" languages are both less safe and less expressive. Statically typed functional languages like Haskell and OCaml allow much more correct code and reject much more wrong code compared to something like Java or Go. I'd even go as far as to argue that in some ways, Haskell is more expressive than the mainstream dynamic languages (Ruby, Python, JS etc).

Now, if your developers are really "idiots" (which to me is a very condescending thing to assume, but that's a different story...), then maybe they won't even be able to get their code to type check in the first place and ship no code at all :)

> Statically typed functional languages like Haskell and OCaml allow much more correct code and reject much more wrong code

In functional code, sure. In a predominantly mutable algorithm, you fight the language more than what you gain, and sometimes, yes, the mutable approach is simpler and easier to reason about. Especially local mutability can be very readable/maintainable.

Local mutability is not particularly difficult in either Haskell or OCaml.

All of the currently-popular technologies you mentioned were new and immature at one time. The reason we have better languages and tools now than we did 30 years ago is because people are willing to adopt them.

If the attitude you're encouraging were followed, these would all have been relegated to unsuccessful research projects and we'd all still be programming in assembly language.

I think that most of the useful work is done by the few, the proud, the nutjobs, who aren't going to listen to this advice anyway. You (for a given value of you) don't need to build a product in Elixir, they (for a given value of they) will, and if they stick with it for long enough everyone else can catch wind and begrudgingly add it to the pile. It's the circle of life!

I mean, I don't follow that advice at all, and if you don't want to you shouldn't either, but there's definitely a fair argument that it would be "better" for most cases to accomplish your goal with boring technology.

The field was changing a lot quicker thirty years ago than it does today and the technology was much less mature. It's natural to become more conservative with technology choices over time.

And what's interesting about most of the popular languages is that they additionally ignored the state of the art even at the time of their creation, much less throughout their development. It's crazy that things like ML and Scheme were around since the 70s and Erlang since the 80s and Smalltalk since the 80s but basically nothing that made these languages excel at building systems can be found in Java, Python, JavaScript, C++, etc.

It's weird to me that it's the stubborn languages that seem to make it through.

Java was originally planned as a “wolf in sheep clothes”, bringing the best ideas of lisp and smalltalk (GC, memory safety, dynamic linking), and selling it to C++ devs. While these were not new per se, they were new to “the average developer”. And I would even go as far to claim that GC is perhaps the biggest productivity/safety boost our industry has seen, single handedly.

And they continue to introduce new ML features in the form of pattern matching, ADT, etc.

I think sometimes these languages get unfairly evaluated.

I'm surprised to see Kotlin in your list. Google has stated they are increasingly moving Android development to a Kotlin-first ideology. New official libraries produced by Google for Android are designed with Kotlin chiefly in mind, so it may provide significant benefits to support, community, and documentation.

Considering the popularity of the Android platform and Google's control over it, I don't think it is a bad idea to develop an Android app in Kotlin. According to Google, their Maps, Home, Play, Drive, and Messages apps are all built in Kotlin, and my personal experience is that Android developers like and prefer Kotlin.

> Google has stated they are increasingly moving Android development to a Kotlin-first ideology

Wow if Google is behind it, where do I sign up? It’s definitely going to take off and not be abandoned.

I probably could even write some games I could release on Stadia.

I thought they were fully committed to Dart or was that last week?

Kotlin is JetBrains, not Google. Even if Google declared bankruptcy tomorrow, it would still be under active development.

And how well was Kotlin doing before it was backed by Google?

Very well. Google deciding to back it for Android wasn't some bold, out there decision. Android developers could already use kotlin, because of its Java interop. Google was just responding to pre-existing demand that the community was already generating.

That's why I don't think it makes much sense to treat kotlin in the same category as the other languages. Sure, it's a programming language, but the way JetBrains executed on it with its easy upgrade path from java and really excellent design, not to mention the toolchain, mean that it's success and trajectory cannot easily be generalized to other "weird languages".

Kotlin is JetBrains only Google has blessed it...

Also compiled languages have longer staying power because if you move on from the language, you can still make use of the binaries but simply never write it again. Look at all the Fortran libs that are still in use by other languages...

Yes and how popular do you think Kotlin would be without Google’s “blessing”?

Kotlin was recognized by Google because it was getting traction, not the other way around. Get your facts straight.

> Wow if Google is behind it, where do I sign up?

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/

They don't distinguish between managed environments/multilingual platforms (JVM, .NET, wasm) and single pony shows. Which makes it harder to see how related Scala/Kotlin/Java are and how much they overlap ecosystem-wise.

> and my personal experience is that Android developers like and prefer Kotlin

That is because the other option is a deliberately crippled Java from a decade ago. Also, while apps are indeed mostly written in Kotlin for android, I am fairly sure most of Google’s listed apps have a Java shared library that does the core of the functionality that is shared between backend, android, web frontend (j2cl) and ios (j2objc).

Also, don’t forget that android development is a niche, on the web backend side Java is just an incomparable bigger player.

Meanwhile I will take "weird" languages almost any day... Icon (Unicon), Snobol4, Pike, Awk, Pascal. In a perfect fantasy world I'd also hire these people first.

As the article indicates, there's no SO or Google to find solutions easily... You need to read the docs or find some dark corner of the web for help you require. It highlights passion and genuine interest in understanding what you're doing and figuring things out yourself. Whereas your languages are financially job driven... Not curiousity driven; and my issue with that is if you can learn the esoteric languages, the mainstream languages are laughably easy.

I also love weird (/old) languages as the community that exists, however small, are asking 400-level questions amongst each other and not CS-101 topics. There's a nice serenity in not having polluted search results of utter basics.

Snobol4! I keep a couple of books like Snobol4 programming and my C64 Reference Guide around to remind the kids that the history of computing was old even when I started. It's surprising reading through those older texts and languages how little things have changed other than the speed of computation and connectivity of computer networks.

Ignoring unusual languages doesn't guarantee you are financially driven, sometimes it just means you're more interested in the actual use case than the tech.

My favorite programming language is an amazon link. If I can say "I could build this, but it already exists here", I'm happy because I know I've given them something truly professional in a week that would have taken way longer and cost way more to build, plus any random person can work on it and parts will be available on eBay.

Using common languages is just an extension of that.

If someone uses unusual languages, I expect they'll have unusual problems that will become my problem if I'm working with them.

I agree with you 100%, especially on the first paragraph. Definitely I'm interested in use cases and knowing best tool for job. I only mentioned the finance part as the poster mentioned recruiting a couple times... Thereby a job, and money.

I agree. For most CRUD applications, developers should mostly integrating off-the-shelf components, and not constantly be reinventing the wheel. The reason for that being, that customer value (and satisfaction) can be attained by delivering a usable product, and that is what pays the bills at the end of the day. Whether that product is implemented in Python or Elixir is often not visible.

On the other hand, if the task at hand requires a novel approach and using tools that are less frequently used, then that will also be justifiable. Are you developing something that only makes sense to run on the BEAM virtual machine? Go ahead and work with Erlang or Elixir.

Now a third category is programming for enjoyment. In that case you don't work with the constraints of profitability, and you can just have fun. And don't worry too much about Beating the Averages (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

Enjoyment is much more important than many managers think. Attrition is real, especially nowadays. Enjoying the work, which includes the programming language among other things, plays a big part in hiring and attrition.

I hear you, the last thing I want to feel is dread when implementing something. But recently my priorities have shifted a lot with regards to using the fancy, the new and the shiny. Sometimes I just want to end the day with getting something done and going home with the feeling of satisfaction and having achieved something tangible. Again, context matters with these things.

And with regards to employee retention, I would rather bet big on benefits (paid time off, parental leave, etc.), reasonable working hours (4 days per week), achievable goals, great communication, democracy and good team cohesion. I have a feeling this works for a lot of people. If a language is the only thing that makes you stay, by all means find a place that truly makes you happy in that regard. All I am saying is that there are a lot more variables to worker satisfaction.

> I would rather bet big on benefits (paid time off, parental leave, etc.), reasonable working hours (4 days per week), achievable goals, great communication, democracy and good team cohesion

Those are important factors also. But I would prefer to work 5 days per week and enjoy my work rather than working 4 days and not enjoying it because the PL sucks. Just my 2 cents.

You make an assumption that using “weird” language is new and shiny when those are generally older than “established” languages of today. You can end the day with getting something done in “weird” language too, again generally faster than in some obtuse Java or Go codebase.

> You can end the day with getting something done in “weird” language too, again generally faster than in some obtuse Java or ~~Go~~ codebase.

Yeah, I would like to see a source on that.

How did you miss PHP in that list of languages? It’s the most popular web development language. It has 2 very popular web frameworks (Laravel and Symfony, although Laravel seems to have the bigger developer community) and the language has been evolving in a pretty good direction.

PHP is in decline.

It's getting ever harder to find good PHP developers.

PHP will be around forever, but it's getting less popular.

PHP is an insignificant, declining language outside of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. Those three combined are ~90% of all sites running PHP[1].

I'd wager that most of the remaining PHP sites are wikis and legacy applications that are too painful to port.

1. https://kinsta.com/php-market-share/

> Those three combined are ~90% of all sites running PHP[1].

How are you getting that number? From the link you referenced, the percentages are Wordpress: 40%, Joomla: 2.6%, Drupal: 1.7%

Did you actually read the article you posted? It states that 79% of sites are using PHP. WordPress is 40%, Joomla 2%, Drupal 1%. So no, they don't combine to ~90% of PHP sites, far from it!

The article even concludes with: "PHP is far from dead, no matter what any disgruntled developer may tell you. After all, 79.2% of all websites in the world can’t all be wrong, and most importantly, PHP’s market share has remained relatively steady throughout the last five years (oscillating between 78–80%). Few programming languages command that type of staying power."

PHP powers a lot of legacy code bases, yes. But there are also a lot of job opportunities in Laravel and Symfony which are both very good frameworks.

The fact that a lot of WordPress websites exist in the wild doesn't make it the most popular web dev language...

> You need a VERY good reason to use anything except [...] Oracle

I promise, Oracle (the company) is a good reason to use anything except Oracle.

While I've seen many projects out there use Oracle DB without that many issues, I'm inclined to say that MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL are both easier to work with due to how easy it is to setup new instances (either on a server, or in containers for testing/development) and how they're generally just simpler to use and more carefree products (though perhaps that's because of sane defaults, e.g. no problems with tablespaces that don't autoextend), even when something like Oracle XE exists.

On a more humorous/worrying note, there's also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

For web development you need a very, very good reason to use anything but Rails or Laravel. It got to the point where now I only work with companies who use Rails. I don’t even really like Ruby, but I eventually got fed up with wasting time reinventing the wheel over and over, using frameworks that provide only a fraction of what Rails does.

Sadly this is shifting; at least in my country most companies are moving away from Rails/Django/Laravel towards Typescript and NodeJS for the sake of "scalability" and sharing language with the frontend.

Some smaller companies have found that choosing “weird” languages gives them a much more focused pool of candidates from which to choose. Advertise for a Java position and you’re going to be overwhelmed with résumés.

And you’re doing a grave disservice to Elixir at the least. I prefer Erlang myself, but Elixir has established itself as a robust choice.

I stupidly built a product with Svelte and I certainly had a "focused pool of candidates" -- no one at all with experience using Svelte.

At Basho, we were happy to hire people without Erlang experience as long as they had FP skills.

Yeah, I definitely don't care what backend language experience someone has before hiring them.

I haven't had the same luck with frontend. There's so much magic, config file hell, and other rough edges that you need someone who knows the framework. In the JS world, actually writing code is maybe 50% of the work, and managing the ecosystem (config, build, packages, etc.) is the rest.

Typescript, Golang, Rust are all relatively new. That means only a few years ago they were niche, no one used them. Rust still is niche. They could have died in popularity like the other languages you mentioned have, but they haven’t, it’s impossible to predict what will succeed and what will die.

If you only stay with what is popular nothing new becomes popular.l and you become mediocre.

Popular isn’t always the right choice. There’s the situation things are only popular because they are popular. React seems to fit that now, it’s the default as everyone else is using it even if there’s newer alternatives.

Innovation only happens by doing things different.

Choose what is appropriate, not what is popular or what is new.

Unless you want to leave an unmaintainable nugget of code for the future dev, you would use something that is actually in use and backed by someone relevant, not a shiny new thing.

The three you mentioned got over the hump by corporate backing. In particular Rust got in force thanks to Mozilla, golang to Google and TypeScript to Microsoft. Big guys sometimes make an abject irrelevancy or failure (e.g. F# which didn't quite catch on, old stuff like Visual Basic) but usually at least the support and visibility is there.

You need a VERY good reason to use anything except PHP. Perhaps Rust. These technologies are good enough to get almost anything done these days.

I find it very odd that PHP wasn’t even in the list of languages. It’s one of the most popular web languages (and that’s not just Wordpress).

Additionally the standard request model of PHP (like with PHP-FPM) is a fast, efficient, and easy to learn model of request for new developers. Easily scalable new processes that are cleared at the end of the request. It seems like this is something people try to emulate with the “server less” model but PHP was built for this and is quite efficient at it.

It is indeed a good and efficient tool, and popular too, but I'm kinda glad it wasn't on the list, because it basically is the point of my tongue-in-cheek comment: choosing the "universal list of tools to solve any problem" is a PERSONAL achievement. It's just basic reality that both Python and PHP are good enough to make things. Some people have one on the list, some another, some may have both.

And it's not even true that Haskell cannot be on that list for any sane human. Admittedly, it's not on MY list, but that's just me. Popularity isn't the end of things, nor is it set in stone. Agda or TLA+ aren't very common, but neither are problems they are meant to solve. Neither is Verilog, but it's not even an alternative to anything popular. And Ruby wasn't popular before Rails. Then it was, then it wasn't again. I thought that I was done with Java, but then Android became a thing. I guess you get the point.

…I think I'd like if there was only 1 language for everything, but I don't think it's even remotely possible, because then there would be different dialects of that EsperantoPL, different frameworks or ways to use it, and people would never agree on 1 thing anyway.

I'm not doing embedded systems in PHP. I'm not doing high-performance computing. I'm not doing operating systems. I'm not doing an enterprise database. I'm not writing the JVM in PHP. I'm probably not even doing a desktop app in PHP.

All the world is not a web app...

> You need a VERY good reason to use anything except PHP.

Yeah, like for instance: nobody knows or wants to know PHP.

A very mature, non-weird (i.e. C-style syntax) and popular language can make it easier to recruit many developers but it is what will make that necessary in the first place.

A language of a somewhat more sophisticated design can make it harder to find developers but let you need much less.

E.g. Scala (which, contrary to the myth, has great learning curve and readability as long as you don't insist on making heavy use of the really weird parts - they are entirely optional) vs Java can easily boost productivity 10 times. Scala code usually is less verbose and works perfectly once built successfully - ~99% errors are detected at compile time. I know numerous Java devs who have switched to Scala to solo-dev efficiently, because they have no time to code and debug Java. Kotlin was designed based on the Scala experience to make it even better.

I really like Scala, but that 10x claim is just straight bullshit. You hardly have 10x difference between goddamn C and some high-level language!

Okay, maybe 7x, that's subjective, imprecise and strongly dependent on how experienced you are in Java. For a skillful Java developer that may be as low as 3x.

You honestly believe that you would finish, let’s say a CLI time manage like timewarrior in Scala even 3 times as fast as someone remotely decent in Java?

There are also companies saddled with tech that was mainstream but is no longer. Adobes Flex was a great option until it was killed. Perl was everywhere now it's almost esoteric to find a greenfield project in Perl.

Ruby on Rails used to be one of the most popular ways of implementing MVC applications in the server. Has Ruby been hit by a similar fate?

Ask any company dependent on Ruby how its recruiting efforts are going.

Anyone from Square, Stripe, or Shopify want to chime in on this?

I haven't had a problem finding Ruby devs, but I haven't had to hire in a couple of years.

I'm not at any of those companies but it's harder than it was five years ago for sure.

I’ve got a handful of excellent ruby devs available for project work. If anyone needs help, holler.

It still seems pretty relevant and useful.

I was back on the job market not too long ago and I was stunned to discover how many startups are still using Rails. It's well off the hype peak now but there's a lot more life in it than I supposed.

Not dead just yet but things are not looking promising. eg Ruby is 20th on TIOBE vs 13th last year. Other measures are showing a similar downward trend.

Not impossible to reverse but very hard, especially since Ruby only has once niche and has not been doing well there.

I have a friend that swears up and down that his startup on Erlang was able to deliver incredible speed of development and stability specifically because of language choice.

WhatsApp, Facebook Chat used Erlang, and Discord is still using Elixir… make of that what you will, I suppose.

And Ruby / Rails + your frontend of choice is still a ridiculously productive stack to bring up an app, and probably run it at any scale you’re likely to realistically hit (poster child being Shopify)… if you ever get to stage of “scaling problems”, you are at a stage where you’d be rearchitecting parts of your stack regardless of what your original implementation was in.

So in sum, choosing a particular language because of popularity, I think, is not particularly useful framing. I’d say, choose one because it either gives you joy to write in and maps to your thought process well, or because it has a particularly strong ecosystem for the subject matter. Life is too short to program every day in a language that you dislike just because you think it’s the “safe choice” :)

That's an interesting point. Do you think your friend was able to deliver at such speed because of the familiarity with Erlang? Or was it so, that even with a lack of familiarity, the other advantages of the language were overwhelming? Also, may I ask what kind of application was being developed?

I also wonder how we can define popularity better. Does that mean industry acceptance, number of GitHub repositories, number of StackOverflow questions, number of libraries, developer satisfaction surveys, etc. If you choose different metrics here, different languages and frameworks will appear popular. Svelte for example seems to be on top of some developer satisfaction surveys, but React is still one of the number one choices for frontends. C is the industry standard for embedded, but developers often do not enjoy programming in it.

I’m not sure how much Erlang he had done before he started the project… it was something in the professional group chat space, but Slack ate the world.

Yeah, there is always a balance to strike and a multitude of factors that might lean the decision this way or that…

And even in something like embedded it seems like there is movement, I have seen some posts about people using Zig or Rust or Nim for embedded programming for example.

It's funny to see something like react on the list of frameworks to use.

When I started the main project I am still maintaining, react wasn't even around yet. It started only 9 years ago, which might seem like a long time to some younger folks, but feels like yesterday to me.

Are you suggesting that languages and frameworks are 'solved' now? That we won't get a new react that changes the ecosystem? How will a new language or framework that makes things easier ever come about if everyone follows your advice?

Frameworks aren't "solved", but React (for example) is big enough that pretty much all common problems have already been solved and can be easily found with a search engine.

Sure, but you can say the same about Ruby on Rails… but for some reason, Ruby is on the list of ‘never use’ languages

Rails was the shit for the longest time, it was one of the first "magic" languages where you could just do stuff and MAGIC made it work.

It just somehow fell behind on the hype curve, mostly because Ruby itself wasn't used for anything else than Rails. Python took its spot in most general use cases.

> There's any number of companies saddled with their main systems being built in the weird assed framework that the fourth-to-last CTO decided was a good idea, and those companies are now stuck with the problem.

I'm going with this as the problem statement, and it is a problem, but I submit that being saddled with a technology is a cultural problem, not a technical one. Related: Conway's Law Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

> If you are the person deciding which technologies to use, you should probably be using the most mainstream thing you can, not the coolest newest thing that you read on Hacker News.

This solution does not address the problem statement, and so will sometimes be a good answer, but only by accident, and makes the same mistake as choosing "the coolest new thing on Hacker News". Choosing a technology to address a specific challenge is not always easy or obvious, but takes thought, humility, consideration, familiarity with the options, probably even a team decision. A manager that just top-down decides for the engineers is doing it wrong, whatever they choose.

> Apart from anything, you should be using these most popular technologies if only for the sake of recruiting.

There's actually a tricky tradeoff here. Many startups working on hard problems can benefit from making one weird technology choice, if it offers them some kind of significant leverage on a previously difficult technical problem.

But when it comes to recruiting, it can actually be an advantage to be using a slightly obscure language. Often, these languages have communities of very skilled early adopters who wish they could use their favorite language at their day job. And especially if your company has a strong remote culture, this may make it possible to hire some extremely talented people.

I do agree that, on average, a company's overall tech choices should be mostly boring. But knowing when a lesser-known tool will offer a big advantage is an art, and it can pay off.

I wouldn't lump Kotlin in with some of the other less-popular there, if a place is already all-in on Java then Kotlin is a natural next step and can be adopted incrementally with 0 technical issues.

If it's an issue with existing devs refusing to skill up, they can just write their ancient antiquated Java until they retire, it'll still work just fine alongside the new Kotlin code. But in my experience it's rare that even the most institutuonalised Java dev doesn't appreciate the nullability support at least.

I’d probably footnote out Kotlin as preferable for greenfield projects over Java. Maybe F# as well (and all CLI languages, by extension) since intermixing them as needed in a solution is largely effortless. Otherwise, I fully agree with your comment.

While I share a similar opinion, the languages to be picked for a project should the official languages of a specific platform, meaning "Pick platform X", "X allows X, Y and Z languages on their official SDK/tooling", "X, Y and Z get the price of chosen languages for the project".

However I also think, that time should be spent in non-mainstream languages to learn new programming concepts, and eventually future version of "X, Y and Z" might even get those concepts and thus one is better prepared to apply them.

So, if we followed this advice, none of these technologies should have ever been used in the first place, because popularity takes time to establish.

I hope "company/organization development" includes lots of projects that don't require you to recruit a hundred fresh grads to get started.

This has been just as true 20 years ago, except that the list was different.

(But then again your list is also kinda weird. I mean, seriously, it has React but not C++?)

Rust has maybe 0.01 percent of real-world code presence compared to a real language.

Come out of the reality distortion bubble, please.

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