I mean, I solve most of my problems with the hammers I have at hand. But I try not to fall exclusively in this trap of “I will use tech X because that’s what I know.”

But I see a majority of my programming peers who will avoid moving “forward” because it’s easier to “stay behind.” At first, this works, because the difference between what’s new and evolving versus what’s established and a “core competency” is trivial and easy to marginalize. As it persists over time though, the investment can become a real millstone.

I am pretty comfortable with Python. We use it some pretty key areas in our product. It’s an established technology and competency for us. Last year, I needed to construct a service that was going to involve spinning up LOTS of little long lived threads. I was concerned about doing this in Python. Doing so would be easy and straightforward. “Because I know it” would definitely have said “do this in Python right now, deal with scaling issues later.” Instead I looked around and deemed this a good reason to take Elixir for a spin. I’m glad I did. It turned out to be a good fit for this problem. “Because I don’t know it” caused others around me to raise their eyebrows and question my approach initially. Was it the 100% best choice? Who knows for sure. But it’s worked out well. Ironically, just the other day, a data serialization library I have in both systems, the Python one needed to run faster (new use case for it suddenly needed speed that we didn’t hitherto care about). After some profiling, I rearchitected the python algorithm to be more similar to the Elixir one and gained about 50% speed up.

That would be a VERY interesting case study. Any chance you could write it up as a blog post or similar?