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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

    > Clojure was not a hiring barrier - it was a hiring filter.

It makes me think about this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11933250

    > Jane Street Capital's Yaron Minsky once said that contrary to popular belief hiring for OCaml developers was easier because the signal to noise ratio in the OCaml community is so much better than other, more approachable languages.

I saw a YouTube vidoe years ago that featured Yaron Minsky. He made similar points. In short, some programming languages are like catnip for excellent programmers.

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PG wrote about this back in 2004: https://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

> Hence what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it.

It also helps that Jane Street has like 3k employees, a good chunk of whom never touch code at all, and of those that do, a good chunk who won't be touching OCaml. Hundreds of OCaml programmers though, yes.

That may not scale for larger companies.

Also important to note, they don't require you to know OCaml when you get the job. They will teach you OCaml.

All that said, man it would be cool to work for JS (or anyone really) and write OCaml.

Can confirm that OCaml is a good language to work with. And it's not so difficult to get your head around, especially with LLMs to hold your hand.

>In short, some programming languages are like catnip for excellent programmers.

I think that misses the point.

Things that are hard have a higher percentage of people who don't need it to be easy.

If you're a "good" programmer you don't need the "community support" (i.e. a bunch of stuff to tell you why you should do things one way or the other in your particular language) so you're free to choose niche languages based on other factors and in turn there will be more good programmers programming in those languages.

You see this in all sorts of subjects not just programming.

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