This is the most Hacker News thing I read all year. What are you talking about? Where did he say anything about wanting to cause a paradigm shift?
Facebook was PHP.
Google was C++.
Bitcoin was C++.
Netflix was Java.
Spend your innovation points on your product, not on programming language.
Most Telcos, what’s app used Erlang.
Apple used Objective C, and built its own language.
Microsoft used C++… and built a series of languages.
Most of the web programming was in flash… until suddenly JavaScript won out.
Except for Figma which uses WASM based stuff.
Spend innovation points on your product… but sometimes innovative products require innovative ways to built it.
Nokia Networks customers were using a mix of C++ and Perl running on HP-UX back in 2004, and nowadays it is mostly C++ and Java running on Linux distributions. Not every telco is using Siemens Erlang based switches.
Apple created Clascal and Object Pascal, migrated to C++, got Objective C via NeXT acquisition, which previously licensed it from StepStone. They also created Mac Lisp, Hypercard, Dylan and Newtonscript.
Microsoft used BASIC for a looong time, dabbled with Pascal, had one of the best macro assemblers in the market, was the last MS-DOS vendor to actually add C++ support to their C compiler, focused on VB and C++ until .NET came to be.
I've never in my life done anything that I feel standard languages aren't a good fit for.
I do think Dart deserves full best practices status, because the tooling and ecosystem around it is fantastic, and because it doesn't have a bunch of "Outside the paradigm" stuff, it's all things you can learn in a week coming from Py/JS/etc.
I'm not exactly sure what the slowness people talk about is. Even the most bloated of websites are fast.
The one thing that still is an issue is Android load times. It gets a little excited about killing background apps on my phone and will take 10 seconds to open my notetaking app again.
Runtime errors.
any chance you could find and link to that thread?
Sure if your value add is content then go ahead and use mature tools within the paradigm, but if you want to cause a so called "paradigm shift" then you'll need to understand where the progress is happening and what kinds of opportunities it creates.
Ocaml for example is looking more and more enticing. Standard meta language is used by academics and programming language theory is developed in it. Meaning that it has a good long term trajectory (along with lisps I suppose).
Of course we are about to grow out of syntax, soon it'll just be another config param in your editor.. but I don't think these "obvious choices" you list will all be as well positioned w.r.t. that change.
Right now it may be harder to agree with me than with you, but that makes me think of a hn thread I was reading recently where people didn't want to admit to being programmers (in public / to strangers) because the perception is starting to be that what we do is immoral. Sufficient mastery of programming will make it a boring thing that everyone knows how to do but lowering the bar to that point won't happen within the web paradigm we currently inhabit. We'll see if wasm brings us closer but I think it will take more than that.
Anyway, I'd say your advice is good but not great. A CTO should be able to assess which tools fit the problem they have for the timescales they're considering. If they're swayed by your comment (or mine for that matter) then they're not fit for the role. The person you are actually talking to is someone who is building a company that suffers tech while the core business is something else or a company that is meant to be sold to some giant.