Crap developers get excited by new tech. Good devs want to get problems solved. If a new tech is the best solution then use shiny new tech. Usually it´s not the best choice.

What a ridiculous statement. You can be excited by new tech and realize how it can solve your problems.

New languages lack most of what is needed to be highly productive. Tooling is minimal to none. Libraries are sparse and still catching up, this takes many years. Many gotchas remain undiscovered and will bite you in production.

To get actual product work done with optimal efficiency, a mature ecosystem will always win.

And you can be maintaining a system built by developers who got excited by shiny new tech and made a load of inappropriate technology choices because they were flavor of the month and looked good on their resumes.

It sounds like you've had bad experiences with some devs and you're applying that to everyone.

Maintaining a codebase written in C is far far harder than one written in Java and that's far harder than one written in Go.

I have worked in tech long enough to see some common patterns. It's usually intermediate devs (though not always) who get excited by new tech. The same people are usually pushing to use shiny new tech in places where it isn't needed. You don't get cynical old school devs trying to replace working parts of the tech stack with tech less than 5 years old.

Personally i think developer skill has far more to do with maintainability than language choice. And I have worked with a lot of shit code.

I agree with you, developers do get excited when are using newer technologies but the question is what if a new problem arises and they might not be able to find a to it solution.

Just like how they did in this case completely switching from Go to Rust

Then they'll have to cross that bridge when they come to it. Nothing of this article gave me the impression that the second they saw this bug they're like WELL TIME TO SWITCH.

I'm sure we're glossing over probably hundreds of hours of investigations by dozens of people.

We kept dealing with GC pauses in go, and eventually after investing a bunch of time trying to fix this - we decided to research what it'd be like to rewrite it in another language.

The service itself is pretty simple, so it wasn't a gargantuan task. So it was either, rewrite this again in Go (using off-heap data structures to avoid GC pauses, which makes the software both harder to maintain, and also less idiomatic) or try a new language where we won't have these issues - where we don't have to resort to clever hacks to work around the runtime system.

Since then we've continued our investment in Rust, after success of this project (and many others we've yet to blog about as well.)

Excitement < the countless hours required to rewrite a complex system in a non-trivial language.

And do you have numbers to back up excitement of devs vs their productivity?

It seems like everyone is just applying their subjective view. Which is fine. Just don't assume your equation works for everyone and every business.