If a developer wants to use a hammer for everything, because everything looks like nails to him, then I doubt in his professionalism. Sure, dev preferences matter, but only within the space dictated by the client requirements. Customers do not care if the thing they are using was created with C or Haskell. They care about price, performance and features. It might be harder to program in C++, but the final result can better fulfill the requirements.

Devs prefer one language over the other, because they consider it to be better for their use case - it is not because of religious reasons.

Clients typically don't have the technical expertise to dictate what technology the dev should use. If the client knows what technology they need, they should simply look for those devs who have expertise in that technology.

Half the languages that you see succeed today(the other half are those pushed by megacorps as the only developer platform), are because of dev preferences - not because of client requirements.

Yet they often choose wrong tool for the job. We often see games written in Java, big websites created in PHP, or processing huge amounts of data in Python. Here someone wants to do embedded in Haskell. These are not technical reasons. The reasons for these choices are frequently "this is the only tech stack I know" or "this is easier to learn".

Facebook has been written in php, and minecraft in Java - because that was the language that the developer preferred. Are you saying this was wrong? Both developers made billions of dollars from it.

If a client needs a particular technology then he should look for specialists in those technologies. Otherwise, just leave it to the developers preference.

And reasons such as 'this is the only tech stack I know' or 'this is easier to learn' are perfectly good reasons. Reasons for a lot of things are not technical. You think Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook for technical reasons? In fact familiarity with a tech stack and simplicity of learning are seen as key technical considerations when choosing a technology for development. You must be very immature to think these are not technical reasons.

They both made billions DESPITE their technology choice, and both systems had to undergo a serious rewrite later. There are dozens of other projects out there almost noone ever hears of because they turn out to be a disaster and are cancelled (I was consulting a few such cases which ended up in court, because developers were not able to deliver the product with the required level of capabilities and performance, despite using their preferred, but seriously suboptimal technology). Or they are even a business success but then their users are constantly cursing while using them. Users are often not the same people who buy software, so sometimes you can make business success despite technical inferiority of the product. Marketing often beats technical features.

> You must be very immature to think these are not technical reasons

Sorry, but this ends the discussion for me. I thought we were discussing on merits, not ad hominem arguments.

At some point you have to learn to take critical feedback about yourself and not shut yourself down or vehemently keep repeating the same thing using different words.

You are making immature statements like - Time to learn a technology and familiarity with a stack are not technical considerations. I expect a junior engineer to make such statements but not a senior engineer or a hiring manager. These are critical technical considerations when choosing a technology. Your statements show immaturity - period. If a director of engineering asks an engineering manager if he will consider the tech stack familiarity and learning curve for the team when choosing a tech stack and the manager responds in the negative, trust me - he will start looking for a new engineering manager. You are fixated on picking the "right technology" while your team loses momentum and attrition sets in. You sound like you think your technical decisions are unbiased, but Zuckerbergs decision to use PHP was biased. It is obvious why Zuckerberg used php. He was familiar with php and that was the fastest way for him to build a website. But according to you he made a terrible technical decision and he should have used something else. This is an immature statement. BTW, Facebook still runs on php.

A piece of advice, do not try to impose your biases - technical or otherwise on other engineers. They will do what they want to do. If you join a team and they do not share your technical biases - you have 2 options 1. Show them why the technical choices you propose will help those developers in the long run. 2. Join a different team which shares your bias

Badgering them with your opinions is not an option. Your options are - Show the developer why building Arduino copilot is not in his long term interests. The other option is - Galois is making tons of money by building copilot for safety critical embedded projects for NASA. May be you can also talk to NASA and get them to shut down the project. Otherwise you are just wasting your time and everyone else's time.