Comment by wulczer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wulczer | Hacker News Reader

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I guess I'm looking from a startup founder perspective...

If you choose an unknown technology because you have solid reasons to believe it will bring a substantial advantage to the product, which will offset the loss in productivity, then sure. If you choose it just so that your team will be motivated and you willingly take the productivity hit for that, I find it difficult to understand.

It's not the technology choice, it's the reasons that seem weird to me. It's probably because of the runway length they have that they can venture into unknown territory for no reason other than trying things.

I'm reminded of Asana and Lunascript - a fun experiment you can afford when you have lots of money in the bank, but not something I'd see as practical.

I'm not sure there is necessarily a productivity hit. The tradeoff is between a smaller number of better programmers on a new technology stack and a larger number of worse programmers on some boring old technology stack.

Also, don't forget that these people have to invent the product as well, not just code it. Their productivity as inventors may be a lot higher on their preferred platform.

Obviously, it's not the same for every kind of product, but Fog Creek doesn't make medical devices.

It is not clear if there are better programmers on a very new cutting edge technology stack.

I heard there are more works to clean up Rails codebases nowadays.

As of recently, I'm primarily using Java and I can say with confident that while it is old and boring, there are plenty knowledge sharing out there that elevates the brain of many developers (even by a small amount). Not to mention that the libraries have evolved in a much greater pace to support recent best practices (MVC, DB migration, unit-test, DI, mock, BDD, TDD, you name it, the Java community have them).

Maybe so, but it's not like Joel Spolsky chose some arbitrary new technology and is now desperately looking for good people to use it. It seems to be literally the other way around.

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