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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone knows Python

No they don’t. Just like everyone doesn’t know Cobol, Fortran, Scala etc.

But by having a programming language as your build tool you now make it harder for new people to onboard. As in order to build project they often need to some unique, specific to the language syntax. And in order to find this syntax they look around on Github and because it’s a programming language every project has their own unique, specific to the project approach.

Versus something like Cargo.toml where it’s simple and consistent regardless of which project you look at.

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> No they don’t. Just like everyone doesn’t know Cobol, Fortran, Scala etc.

Sure somebody might not have Python experience, but it's pretty easy to just not hire someone who says they don't know Python and isn't willing to learn for the role. I don't know that you'd filter out many candidates out of any random 100 devs.

I am talking about graduates and others new to programming.

Of course they are willing to learn for the role but making it hard for them in the beginning can forever turn them off a language. That has been a big problem with Scala and Spark.

I've never seen a language used for ancillary purposes be the make or break on hiring for a role, it's always just been expected that you'd pick it up as you go. And IMO, python is the least offensive compared to stuff like Perl, Ruby (for Chef) or whatever the heck Terraform is.

I have onboarded dozens of Data Engineering graduates in using Spark.

In the beginning this was with Scala and every single one struggled with SBT.

Giving developers unlimited flexibility in how they create build files is a bad idea.

Can they use pyspark?

HCL?

> Sure somebody might not have Python experience, but it's pretty easy to just not hire someone who says they don't know Python and isn't willing to learn for the role.

This works just as well for Scala.

There are way more people who know Python than Scala, and it's also an easier language to get started with.

So then they need to know toml (Tom's Obvious Minimal Language)? https://github.com/gtk-rs/examples/blob/master/Cargo.toml I don't know what this file says.

I think it's hard to argue that Cargo.toml is any simpler than Python. Json might be ubiquitous enough for anyone to read and understand, but if Python is foreign than toml is no better.

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