Idiot proof languages are popular. If you want assured money learn an idiot proof LCD language. In fact, everyone should have one in their tool belt to put food on the table.
However, if you're actually a talented engineer these languages will hamstring you and your art. You will probably eventually gravitate to something more heady (such as the less popular languages) and probably even leave your nice cushy gig to give a professional life in that stack a shot. This isn't, however, to say talented engineers don't exist in lowest common denominator language pools. It's just esoteric/less-used languages tends to cause the best quality of talent to come from them owing from many of their problems. If you can be proficient and productive in a language that you can't easily google a solution for, you're probably an excellent candidate for promotion into the higher echelons.
This is a similar phenomenon to editor choice. My anecdata in a little over 10 years of a career has given me the impression that I can tell what kind of developer someone is by their editor. People who use raw vim/emacs tend to better developers. Why? It's not the editor itself. It's that these editors pull no punches and require time and expertise. That dedication is not taught. The easier an editor is to use for a beginner, the more average a programmer tends to be. Again, there are a lot of very talented developers using VSCode or full blown IDEs. But with those editors your signal to noise ratio is quite low. It's anecdata but mixed with the information above you can gather a lot of "metadata" about a person without much effort.
My anecdata, people who overly focus on language and tools tend to be the worse developers. It's the developers that effectively address the universal problems of writing software people want to use, like api usability, reliability, data consistency, maintainability that have the most props in my book. The best developers I've known weren't particularly attached to any editor, language, or framework.
Serious question: all else equal and without any additional information, between two carpenters who produced the same output in the same time, one with power tools the other without, is there any reason whatsoever to assume one of them is any better than the other?
For me I would definitely make use of this extra information before hiring. Hiring a carpenter who's able to work with power tools is likely better, unless I need to foresee a situation where they must work without electricity. Even if they are physically fit, power tools can enable a human to do something not possible at all with bare hands.
For a programmer it's the reverse, if we assume "power tool" is an "easy" language compared to something like OCaml, or maybe tools like VS Code and Copilot compared to vim. These tools don't help overcome a physical limitation, like the power tools of a carpenter, but a mental one. Being able to set up vim fully to be as productive and produce as few bugs as someone with VS Code, or being able to pick up Haskell without being able to immediately get a human answer your every question, exemplifies the type of higher-level skills and learning capability that is the primary value of a human employee compared to a robot.
In other words, in context of this discussion, the equivalent of carpenter's power tools might be much closer to Haskell + vim than JavaScript + VSC.
I'd think manual carpenter is going to have to retire early due to repetitive strain injury.
The same with "easy"/mainstream languages: something like OCaml/Haskell/Nim/Nix/etc. is a power tool with a steeper learning curve compared to something like Python/JavaScript/shell scripting; you being able (and willing) to handle it without abundance of learning resources says something about your mental capacity and potential value as an employee.
Companies pay employees to add business value. Not to get into their own flights of fancy to do things the hard way. As you mature, you learn only to focus on things that “make the beer taste better”.
I have yet to see an argument by any of the proponents of “obscure” languages where their choice adds business value.
And the “hard problems” that are being solved by the large companies at a scale that has never been solved are doing so by using mainstream languages.
I’ve never seen a report of a job interview where they asked you to reverse a binary tree in Erlang.
The vast majority of problems that developers are being asked to solve are not that hard technically. They are business problems.
I’m motivated to get up everyday for the same reason most people are - money.
I bet you’re looking for people with “passion” and who are willing to consistently put in more than 40 hours a week aren’t you? Out of all the millions of things I can do and have done in my free time over my career (including a working hobby as a part time fitness instructor back in my younger days an avid runner and a weightlifter) spending more time sitting at a computer outside of work isn’t one of them.
And the obscure language would hardly ever outweigh the need to recruit developers easily.
Where have you seen that?
> I’m motivated to get up everyday for the same reason most people are - money.
You are quite mistaken. Once they have enough to exist comfortably, people tend to seek meaning not money. The emergence of OSS ecosystem is the best example -- a lot of it, including the most popular OS in the world, came about as hobby projects people did in their spare time. If you're a software engineer, I bet you use products of their passion a lot in your money-making activities.
> I bet you’re looking for people with “passion” and who are willing to consistently put in more than 40 hours a week aren’t you?
Again, all else equal, if I need to make a decision as to who would be a better, more capable employee in absence of other information, the one who managed to be productive in an obscure language would be higher on my list. Just that. Everything else, making people work overtime, etc., is your addition.
Look at a list of who the largest contributors are to Linux.
https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/
Most of the contributors are getting paid to do so.
Do you really think most of the 2.7 million developers in the US are contributing to open source?
Regarding how many in the US contribute, I don't know the stats... Could probably be more if work-life balance/employment security was better.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
I think this is an apt analogy. Mostly because carpenters who use hand tools produce more beautiful, unique works of art. When everything you do is on rails (no pun intended) you don't have the flexibility or creativity to make works of art. It's like saying Ikea tables (the equivalent of an idiot proof language) are just as nice to look at and functional as a purpose-driven hand crafted table. I have my doubts, despite using Ikea when I "just need something done".
Nice one, being it elucidates the art being lost in other fields (and perhaps all over).
Early in my career I thought of software as art. I was wrong.
The very last thing I want in any production software team is an artist looking to express themselves. I want the worlds most talented engineers who want to use consistent proven methods to create solid maintainable code with zero surprises.
Code as art has its place, granted, but that place is in the privacy of your own time in a repository with one single contributor. I occasionally still go back to writing lisp for fun, but it has no place in production.
The very best engineers are like artists, in that they harness their creativity to solve problems efficiently and effectively, often in innovative and personal ways.
And artists who are respected in the field of software can use consistent methods to produce solid maintainable code. I wouldn't say "zero surprises" though, I'm often surprised by reading the code of an artist, how they achieve extraordinary results with mundane code that a child can understand.
The example that comes to mind is Fabrice Bellard. He's one of the most talented engineers - and I'm sure many of us would agree that his software is a work of art.
Well, as someone who has to manage a team, I completely agree that what's needed are engineers who can consistently produce predictable results. We don't want someone who chooses (or worse, creates!) an esoteric language to pursue their art. But I myself am of the latter persuasion, "writing lisp for fun". And having a team of only non-artistic engineers would be so boring. But then again, boring is what we need most of the time.
As a reformed former dev lead, I wanted a consistent industry standard idiomatic method of writing code and I used a combination of static analysis tools and code reviews to establish a culture to do just that.
I don’t want my C# developers who came from Java writing an AbstractFactoryFacadeBeanProxyDecaratorSingleton.
“Fun” for me is doing anything except being in front of a computer after hours. Between time with my wife, exercise, learning Spanish and just vegging out, computers are the last thing on my mind. I don’t even have a personal computer anymore.
That reminds me of an excerpt from this humorous (but still relatable) bit of writing: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
> Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.
> This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.
> Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they’re told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers’ snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.
You saw that whole spiel about my desire to exchange my labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter?
> However, if you're actually a talented engineer these languages will hamstring you and your art.
I have no desire to be a starving artist. I turn requirements into code so businesses with money will give me some of it by adding business value. I don’t program to create the next Picasso.
I stopped considering programming “fun” after doing it for 10 years across 4 assembly languages (65C02, 68K, PPC, x86) before I graduated from college in 1996.
> and probably even leave your nice cushy gig to give a professional life in that stack a shot
So tell me again why I would leave my “cushy gig” (and it is the cushiest gig you can imagine in any BigTech company)?
> you can be proficient and productive in a language that you can't easily google a solution for, you're probably an excellent candidate for promotion into the higher echelons.
Every single leveling guideline I have seen at any tech company doesn’t mention “ability to code in an esoteric language well”. It’s all about “scope”, “impact”, “managing ambiguity”, etc. “Coding ability” really only comes into play from junior to mid. After that it is about system design even at the interviews.
this makes me sad to hear. I fell in love with programming at age 7 and still love it at 32. I'm extremely fortunate to enjoy something that pays well, rather than languishing at a cushy job that leaves me empty.
> Every single leveling guideline I have seen at any tech company don’t mention “ability to code in an esoteric language well”. It’s all about “scope”, “impact”, “managing ambiguity”, etc. “Coding ability” really only comes into play from junior to mid. After that it is about system design even at the interviews.
if you're hiring plumbers, sure. it's not all plumbing, though. there's algorithm design, compiler engineering, formal verification, program synthesis, numerical methods, etc. etc.
the really effective people in those fields use (or make) weird languages. Isabelle's written in HOL, Coq in OCaml, Agda in Haskell. having a knack for weird languages is a plus for brainy jobs working on that kind of stuff.
My job paying well allowed my wife to buy a vacation home/investment property for the winter and starting at the end of the month fly around the country and stay in mid tier hotels and do the whole “digital nomad thing”.
I spent the first fifteen years out of college having a great time outside of work as a part time fitness instructor (more of hobby) and training and running with friends.
Sure I’m learning a new language now - Spanish.
Making sure that you actually enjoy those hours has a massive impact on your quality of life.
For an extreme example, what pay cut would you be willing to take if you were able to do fitness training full-time?
> My job paying well allowed my wife to buy a vacation home/investment property for the winter and starting at the end of the month fly around the country and stay in mid tier hotels and do the whole “digital nomad thing”.
This is somewhat off-topic and I don't know you or your wife personally, but I find it flabbergasting that a spouse would choose to do the "digital nomad thing" when their partner can't or won't follow them. Even more so when they're being bankrolled by said partner.
If you look at the leveling or hiring guidelines for any major tech company, what separates “senior developers” and up from mid level developers are system design, “handling ambiguity”, leadership, “scope”, “impact” and in the case of Google did you write a messaging app.
Even the largest tech companies realize “coding ability” only gets you so far and most developers who want to get ahead would be far better off focusing on the other aspects of software engineering.
Coding has little to do with handling ambiguity.
While I have never been through a BigTech coding interview, I have been through (and passed) a BigTech system design interview, it has little to do with coding.
Designing (and redesigning) systems for large organizations is my $DayJob where I have to be able to explain those concepts.
Even in C that lacks any form of sane abstraction capabilities, people have come up with object systems and what not if they fit a problem domain better. While I think that the language optimum is well past C, there is no significant difference between modern managed languages in any way besides ecosystems — and that is the most important thing.
Are we really to believe that the average Javascript developer is going to be able to be dropped in an Erlang shop (or any of the other "weird" languages) and be productive any time soon?
I’m sure I could (re)learn Java that I haven’t touched since shortly after it was first introduced in the 90s in a few weeks. That doesn’t mean I would be a competent Android developer.
The average JavaScript developer would be an idiot to ever step foot in Erlang shop if he knew what was good for his career.
My resume was sacrosanct when I was in the enterprise dev world until mid 2020. Why would I reduce my optionality by not using the most marketable technologies?
If the incentive is to ship product then choosing the language you already have a team for makes the most sense.
If you are choosing based on hiring a new team, then the current flavors work. 20 years ago that was Java. Today it's C#. 20 years from now it'll be something else.
If you are a developer looking to grow a resume for the next job, then it's a double-edged sword. Sure it's easier to get a C# gig. But it pays less because you're in a bigger pool. It's harder to stand out. Conversely it's harder to get say a Cobol gig. But it's easier to build a profile in the Cobol community (simply by being under 80 years old) and there is a Lot of work around, and is very well paid.
Equally something that's marginally popular now will have a long tail and can be very lucrative. Erlang might be obscure, but there are plenty of shops who would love to pick up another experienced, capable, erlang developer. You're a bigger fish in a smaller pond.
So yeah, language is like most things, dependant on your point of view. That's why we gave so many of them.
BTW, what languages do you think all of those BigTech companies that pay well are using?
I just keep bringing up C# because that’s the language I have the most experience with. But substitute $any popular language.
Even OCamls share would be bigger within big tech, thanks to Meta.
(and I say this as a big fan of OCaml)
Work is not only about money for me. My best work environments have been a small team of skilled people tackling a big problem. For this we would use whatever is the best tool for the job, regardless of its outside popularity.
also note that Jane Street does everything in OCaml. I can't believe it's bad for their employees' careers. probably because they're not looking for the same jobs as the average JavaScript pleb.
Sure you will. There’s no “Android developer”, there’s Java/Kotlin developer who uses Android SDK.
Who would you rather lead the development of your Android app? Someone with no experience with Android or someone with previous experience.
a) the most experienced amongst the team in any particular language
b) the most experienced amongst the team in any particular domain
c) the go-to person for any particular problem
The whole point of a team is to cover several different sets of knowledge and experience because no one person can know it all or do it all. A leader does their best to enable this collective to produce the best it can.
Leaders know this.
It's a fundamentally different ask to learn Haskell, datalog, SaC. You are actually learning a new language instead of just the flavour of the week imperative programming.
Now the real stuff that can cause problems is bad tooling and lack of support. You cannot code your things when you're trying to fix the compiler, build tools or the debugger.
What good is a language in 2022 without a complete ecosystem of frameworks for most jobs?
Libraries cannot change that basic fact - there are just problems it will be extremely unsuited for.
Java has some of the same problem by the way in reverse. (Package handling, forced garbage collection and unknown real time and memory usage characteristics.) The difference being that Java's core has much less important opinions about algorithms, while Haskell tries to make everything functional or it is awkward.
So, while Haskell will be hard to use for problems best described in an imperative way (in addition to other issues say Java has), Java will only have serious problems where memory and runtime determinism are paramount.
It so happens that a lot of the programming is done in imperative way. Including the libraries.
The last time the third party Haskell SDK for AWS was updated was in 2014. I do see a third party GCP SDK. But if GCP and Azure works like AWS, as soon as a new API is released by a service team, all of the officially supported SDKs automatically get updated.
I am sure there are other service providers that have SDKs and code samples for popular languages.
https://aws.amazon.com/developer/tools/
I believe the list for GCP and Azure are about the same. What are the chances that your problem is such a special snowflake that it can’t be solved with one of those languages? What are the chances that any new developer could ramp up faster or already knows Boto3 (the AWS SDK for Python)? If they have an issue, they can go to StackOverflow or raise a ticket with their TAM.
Which would have more assurances are designed correctly, the one from the vendor or yours? I was able to take advantage of new APIS for one of AWS services the day it was introduced, no need to waste cycles on creating my own wrapper. Creating a wrapper around my cloud providers APIS, “doesn’t make the beer taste better”
AWS’s SDKs automatically take care of retries, exponential back offs, wrapping the APIs to be idiomatic including logical exceptions being thrown, any underlying changes, etc.
The same language? Maybe a few % considering a client is a small part of what you need to create. A different language? Depends on the comparison. I would be tens to hundreds % more efficient in Haskell then in Go or Python.
> I believe the list for GCP and Azure are about the same. What are the chances that your problem is such a special snowflake that it can’t be solved with one of those languages?
Of course it can be solved in those languages. I can also solve it in Assembly or brainfuck with enough elbow grease. What matters is speed of implementation and correctness. With the exception of Rust all these language have debilitating flaws.
> Which would have more assurances are designed correctly, the one from the vendor or yours? I was able to take advantage of new APIS for one of AWS services the day it was introduced, no need to waste cycles on creating my own wrapper. Creating a wrapper around my cloud providers APIS, “doesn’t make the beer taste better”
> AWS’s SDKs automatically take care of retries, exponential back offs, wrapping the APIs to be idiomatic including logical exceptions being thrown, any underlying changes, etc.
Did you ever try openapi generated clients? They can handle retries and exponential backoffs as well. There is no design to be done here. It just exposes the API as designed.
This isn’t meant to be a rah rah AWS is the bees knees. It’s just the cloud provider I know the best (and the one I work for), I’m sure knowing MS, the developer experience is just as good as AWS. I just don’t have experience with it.
> Of course it can be solved in those languages. I can also solve it in Assembly or brainfuck with enough elbow grease. What matters is speed of implementation and correctness. With the exception of Rust all these language have debilitating flaws.
What’s the old saying about it’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools? If you can’t be productive in any of the nine languages that are popular enough to be supported by the major cloud providers, does that say more about the tools or the craftsmen?
https://github.com/brendanhay/amazonka
I use the package directly from GitHub in my project.
It also means you’re competing in a much smaller market and people looking for strong Erlang developers will be suddenly very interested in you specifically, because it’s tough to find strong candidates with this expertise.
It also might mean (depending on your interests) that positions that are open are in a more intellectually interesting problem space, because boring problems tend to be solved in the lowest common denominator languages, and if an unusual language is chosen, it might be chosen because it’s a being used in a unique context.
As in, reductio ad absurdum, “if only I had been working in Java, I’d be safe, but because I worked in Ruby, I am going have to go flip burgers, as no one will let me near their precious production code now?”
I mean, yeah, ok, there was the dotcom bust, and I suppose another could happen at any point, but somehow I get the impression that you’re arguing that using any language except the most mainstream option (whatever that might be for a given industry) is too risky? Or am I misreading?
But in the boring enterprise dev world where I came from especially during the latter part where I was specifically being hired to lead initiatives, of course they wanted someone with relevant experience.
If you want top talent then you've got to offer something they want; sure you can always pay more, but past a certain point that might not be enough, plus it gets expensive. Using better languages is one of the most effective ways to get noticed by the candidates you really want.
When I was in the Enterprise/Corp dev world until a couple of years ago, I could call a few recruiters and have 8 interviews and two or three offers within less than a month. It’s easy to pattern match when you use a popular technology.
Or even the same amount of money when the pay/bullshit ratio starts going in the wrong direction.
You realize all of the BigTech companies use the same “boring languages” don’t you?
The biggest companies largely use dull languages, sure, although you sometimes find pockets within them that are doing something at least a little nicer (e.g. OCaml at Facebook). So much the worse for the big companies.
My excitement during the first decade of my career came from my working hobby as a fitness instructor and running with friends. In less than a month my “excitement” is going to come from my wife and I living out of two suitcases flying across the country staying in mid tier hotels for a few years.
I could spend my free time learning a new programming language. But I am finding it much more “exciting” learning Spanish so when we stay in Mexico for a few weeks, I can at least be able to communicate somewhat.
Not bragging, it’s about what a mid level developer makes at most of the large tech companies.
I definitely couldn’t have afforded my current adventure at my old job nor could I have afforded to retire my wife.
What kind of argument is that? Of course they do, you can’t get away from using JS for front, for example.
But they also use Ocaml, Haskell, Scala.
I'm zero worried about it as it's never been an issue.
If you’re being hired to lead developers and projects, don’t you think you need to know the technology you’re leading?
- back end development in a few popular languages
- about an average “data architect” for lack of a better word. I’ve led implementations on every type of database imaginable including ETL type jobs and online systems.
- “DevOps” (at least if you give me an AWS account) including setting up networking infrastructure, logging, monitoring, CI/CD, etc.
I’ve led plenty of pre-sales meetings, writing SOWs, pretty PowerPoint slides and architecture diagrams etc.
The “generalist” is very useful when you need someone to lead projects and to understand how everything fits together. I’ve had to wear all of the above hats at startups. Now I wear those same hats at a cloud provider I’m sure you have heard of. I specifically targeted my current position because I wanted to be a generalist.
I’m no special snowflake. Many of my coworkers who came up the ranks in startups and have similar experience can do the same.
I'd pass on such a position.
Also you talk about only having experience in a less popular language as a death sentence.
I've been only writing Haskell professionally for a decade, but I get endless amounts of interview invites for prior experience.
Out of curiosity I went through some of the better invitations interview process and had no issue getting offers either.
If anything mentioning my professional Haskell experience gets me an offer faster no matter the positions requirements.
When I spoke to CxOs and directors, they wanted someone with a proven track record that could solve their problems. When I was being hired as a dev lead to lead junior C# developers he inherited, what would he look like hiring someone who knew Haskell?
How was i suppose to go from an empty git repo to a fully fleshed out MVP or later from an empty AWS account to infrastructure, CI/CD, to a fully fledged out MVP if I didn’t have prior experience?
If someone is looking to create a new iOS app. Who should they hire? Someone with iOS experience or someone with Erlang experience?
I personally hate the clusterfuck of the modern front end ecosystem and would avoid it like the plague. But, if I was responsible for choosing the framework to use, I would choose React any day just for recruitment reasons.
Because of this: "The Python Paradox" [1].
Replace Python (which has become mainstream in the meantime) with any other "weird" language from the article and I think the point still stands.
If it matters I had started learning Python just about when this article was being written/published, and in my early to mid-career that advice of using a "weird" language (Python, at the time) was really good for me, got me into a couple of small companies where I really enjoyed working.
Granted, now I'm already over 40 years of age with a mortgage to pay, I'm a little more flexible when it comes to the technologies being used (even though I would cry myself to work in the early hours of morning were I to use Java, and I'm not kidding), but for people who are quite early in their careers letting them explore and use those "weird" languages will still do them a lot of good in terms of them enjoying their programming work, they might even land on a forum written in Arc.
Yes, you leave money on the table if you do that (I know I did, I have friends the same age as me who earn a lot more than I do because they went the non-obscure language path early in their career), but at the same time you also bring some purpose into your professional life, which cannot be entirely bought with money.
Or maybe I was the weak one when I didn't see myself programming in something like Java for a living for my entire career (30 to 40 years), again, that would have literally caused me to cry before going to work, in which case, yes, those persons that can surpass that type of feeling should definitely go for the "more money/less interesting programming stuff" route.
By 2016, I knew I didn’t want to be “just a developer”. I enjoyed working with customers, leading projects, mentoring and teaching. But I still wanted to stay hands on
I belatedly discovered “the cloud” and realized I wanted to specialize in true “Devops” bringing developers and operations together and working with companies to show their developers how to be “cloud native” (application modernization)
When $BigTech came calling about a pure software engineer position, I really wasn’t interested. I kept talking to the recruiter and she told me about a cloud consulting position where I would be able to be involved in the full life cycle from pre-sales, to delivering a finished product including infrastructure. I jumped at the chance.
As an IC, I care about the market. I go to work exclusively to exchange my labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. When it was time to change jobs as your bog standard enterprise dev, it was much easier to throw my resume in the air and get a job offer by being an experienced C# developer than it would have been if I had spent three years writing software in Erlang.
And most job interviews outside of tech companies where most developers work are not going to be language agnostic nor are they going to have you reversing binary trees on the whiteboard while juggling bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.
As a reformed former dev lead, why would I hire an Erlang developer when I could throw a rock and hit a good enough C#/Java JavaScript/React developer to push out some CRUD SaaS app or line of business app?