Like, my team doesn't know anything about Java, but we COULD ship in Java if forced to. We can't ship if the feedback loop is a 30-minute CI pipeline because there is no way to have a local dev environment.
Just as heads up for others.
"Rock bottom is deeper than you think!"
I've seen it. There are definitely incorrect language choices for certain projects.
It would be fair to say that these cases are themselves often exceptions. Many projects can be equally well accomplished by teams skilled in any language. But there is definitely a set of problems for which you can make incorrect language decisions.
I'm going to exaggerate to make the point in an attempt to avoid too much argument about whether or the language would be suitable, but: You do not sit down to write an industry-leading, high-performance database whose top-level implementation language is Python. If your project spec involves running code provided at runtime by users, Go is a fairly poor choice. You can make things a lot harder for yourself trying to be too insistent about what language you'll do your mobile development in, rather than just accepting that there's a very dominant choice in those spaces.
I've also seen projects I couldn't prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt failed due to language selection, but I am fairly certain the project I saw that chose Scala failed primarily for the choice of Scala where it was a bad fit, both technically and for the skillsets of the engineers involved.
I've also seen projects nearly fail because they chose databases incorrectly, which I would submit is a fairly similar thing. Mostly because of choosing a NoSQL database "because fast" when they should have used a relational DB. The projects in question didn't fail because they were able to switch in time, but it was a close thing.
Part of "the composition of the employees of a project" being responsible for its success is that good engineers pick at least a decent solution to a problem from day one. The aforementioned DB problem, for instance, should have been obvious from the very beginning that it was not the correct choice in their case. There are absolutely wrong choices, that can crash projects both quickly and slowly.
I guess we can all agree that writing your web application using a fortran framework to generate JS code is a bad idea.
But if you pick tfa's second example, picking Go vs. Rust for a new project, the language choice is secondary. Both languages were likely fine unless the project as a specific library requirement.
The main criteria to make the choice was likely whether the team had developers with some experience in that language, and whether using that language would make them feel dead inside in the morning when they check in ; and I'm pretty sure developers can be found that make either choice a great choice.
The point tfa's making, that picking a language defines culture, the hiring pipeline etc. is fitting neither the first example (team already there, and a rewrite is almost always a bad choice) nor the second example (team also already there, and the culture with them. Pipeline therefore irrelevant).
You mean they're writing their own database? Why? That's a huge job and available databases are pretty good. There are multiple open-source choices, all of which work.
If they think they're going to compete with Oracle, they need to read the history of Oracle.
Of course, almost no one should attempt this. The number of people with the technical expertise to pull it off successfully is much, much smaller than the number of companies with workloads that would benefit from this.
It doesn't have to be an exotic workload. Sometimes the market is just full of weak implementations e.g. graph databases.
They're just not competing with Oracle.
Don't go running around telling people that they can dig the Panama Canal with three toothpicks and a spare weekend, and if they fail, well by golly they just didn't have enough grit and gumption like us awesome folks who could have done it with only two. Tool choice matters. In fact I can hardly process how anyone can be an engineer and think that it doesn't, let alone how they can think it's some sort of engineering wisdom to claim that it doesn't matter what tools you use to do a project.
Of course, picking the tool is only the moment the project may fail. It is not the moment the project succeeds; there's still a lot of using it correctly that will be necessary and plenty of further opportunities to fail even with the correct tool. But at least success is within the range of possibilities. You can forstall that possibility entirely on day one with incorrect tool choices.
Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to claim this; tooling certainly matters, at the very least, for the happiness and welfare of an engineering team! But, the article tries to claim things like "choosing a programming language is the single most expensive economic decision your company will make" and outside of a few extreme edge cases, I just can't agree with that particular thesis. Even the examples of bad decision-making you pose in your sibling comments, like writing a database in Go or "almost failing" by using sketchy niche datastores, are actually examples of this exact thing: these projects made huge engineering mistakes only to achieve some level of success as a business. Would they have been more successful if they made better engineering decisions? Possibly, but again, language and framework just was not the most important decision or factor driving an outcome.
I'm not saying that means we shouldn't care about making good engineering choices; there are easy ways to do things and hard ways to do things, and certainly I'm going to advocate for and work with people and at companies that favor the easy ways to do things. But when it comes to overall outcomes, I'll stand by having seen far more projects sacrificed to analysis paralysis, rewrites, rewrite-related hand wringing, and language/tooling hubris than sabotaged by poor language and framework choices.
But is anyone REASONABLY competent going to do that? They might pick C/C++, Go, Rust, Java, etc. Those aren't a choice between "bulldozers and toothpicks" - they are more akin to choosing between Caterpillar, Volvo or Hitachi as the vendor of choice for construction equipment. They may have some gaps in their specific list of equipment, they may charge too much for one specific tool, your workers may have experience with one, not the other, etc..
Your example should be the textbook definition of a strawman argument..
Which is, I think, the key point of the OP's article.
And my response to this is:
We need objective, scientific, real-world measurements of PL efficiency, so that informed judgements can be made free of cognitive bias.
This is how science works. Especially medicine. But programmers seem to feel that they are above this stuff.
No, programmers are quite below this stuff. Budgets for medical research, treatments, trials are way more than IT budgets. And for typical IT project the underlying point is even if requirements were wrong, changed halfway , software is malleable enough, to be changed, refactored. And all while it can remain in use even during change cycle.
it is (almost) always people and (almost) never language/framework/…
One argument I would like to add to this original debate is that I have observed two types of developers: one type tries to stick to one programming language for everything (e.g. Java) and tries to write everythin in that language. They are specialist and they may accrue deep knowledge of the language versions, APIs and IDE(s). Another type of developer, in contrast, maintains active knowledge of a dozen programming languages (C/C++, Java/Kotlin, Python, bash, Rust, Go, PHP, JavaScript, ...), and is capable of delivering projects in each. They'd pick a language suitable for the task and stick with it for a project. They won't know any single language as intimately as the first type, but they benefit by virtue of their choice of language being more appropriate to the given project.
That being said, some programs can only be written in one of those. Browser code is JS exclusive, low-level needs C++, secure code needs not C++. Machine Learning needs Python and high performance can't use Python. Some Windows things need C#. Those cases are the obvious ones where there is basically no choice. Beyond those, it is mostly about the team.
Which of course ignores and contradicts the primary lesson of the chap who founded this company and pays for this website.
There is an entire book about it which documents the problems in lavish detail, and it's generally hailed as a classic and a must-read.
Programming language alone should almost never be a big enough issue to force a rewrite, but if you already have serious other issues that force huge changes you might as well look at it at the same time.
This is my experience too. I’d go a bit further and say the leads are the primary driver of success. Because ultimately, if the composition of the people on a project is incorrect, it’s the lead’s responsibility to realize and change it.
For example, migrating a web app from a language that predates Unicode to something that won't require a bunch of scaffolding around every user input sometimes is worth it. Moving from LABVIEW to a real programming language that integrated with remotely modern development tooling was worth it. Switching from C++ to Rust? Probably not.
Counter example:
Weird. LabVIEW is a real programming language. And both LabVIEW and Rust make entire classes of bugs that you often hit in C++ go away, especially for concurrent programs.
> remotely modern development tooling
I would make the argument that it is the tooling, i.e., Git and Diff, that is ancient and not remotely modern. Continually demanding that anything worth source controlling is text-based, and even further line-based, is as antiquated as it gets.
Do you have examples of working version control for non-text programs, including the ability to combine work from two parallel workstreams (aka, merge)? I worked for a long time at probably one of the largest companies using non-text based programming and version control was never even close to solved, and my subsequent forays into the literature when I worked in the "no code workflow" space still came up empty handed for working solutions here. We always fell back to "try to represent the structure of the change in some text-based way."
No one ever names their wires, so there's no variable names anywhere. To see the name of a subvi (think function), you have to hover over it. Sure there's a little picture, but that just means instead of just merely naming my functions I have to draw a little picture. Don't even get me started on wire routing, which is a crucial, manual process for any vi of non-trivial complexity.
Then there's the fundamental engine bugs, which National Instruments' response to hearing about is approximately "get fucked". Like, for example, the GUI rendering breaking in subtle ways when Windows has an update queued. Imagine getting a bug report that consists of "We can't do feature X", and trying desperately to figure out if your code is wrong, or if your customer's just an idiot, only to discover that 0.1% of the buttons in your project just... don't exist sometimes.
Then there's version control, which is rudimentary at best. In order to compare two files, you need to load both files, which even with lazy loading takes what feels like an eternity. Merges? No automation whatsoever. Every merge is manual.
Extremely useful features (like metaprogramming, which is important because of just how miserable writing LABVIEW is) are locked behind shoving obscure keys into ini files like "ABANDONALLHOPEYEWHOENTERHERE=1" or "SuperSecretPrivateSpecialStuff=true" (That second one is real).
Don't get me wrong, LabVIEW has its place as a way to hack together a little control panel to talk to some instruments. But anyone suggesting adding a subvi should be shot, and the project should be rewritten in a real programming language.
That's exactly false. I've single-handedly developed multi-thousand VI projects on different systems, including heavily using the OOP system and actor frameworks.
Comparing language grammars on their own isn't enough any longer.
I had one time it was faster for the three of us to rewrite a web app in Rails than to make the Play framework accomplish what we wanted it to accomplish, even though none of the three of us had ever worked in Ruby before. Rewriting four months of work took two weeks because Rails neatly supported what we were doing and so much could be generated. We ended up with better test coverage too.
There are refreshing exceptions here and there but there's also something to be said about whether it's a good thing that frameworks don't dominate a certain PL (like Golang; everything is very readable if verbose but one does get tired of generating the same boilerplate all the time).
So, this goes for ~70% of all projects ever and ~95% PLs ever?
I would have been a staff Golang engineer, if not a VP of Eng even, somewhere at this point if I didn't fall in love with Erlang's concurrency & parallelism implementation.
I am kind of still offended by the entire IT area that we have multicore CPUs for what, 20 years now, and we still don't make true physical parallelism a first-class citizen in all of our mainstream PLs. Looking at you, Python, and looking at you, Golang, with your ability to crash the program for sending to a closed channel, and looking at you Rust for making async needlessly complex.
(RE: Python, yeah yeah, "GIL is going away next release" and stuff. With that tempo they'll catch up with Golang by 2050.)
> Don't get me wrong - to an extent, some languages (especially more niche ones) drive hiring and what kind of employee you get
In my experience, the community around a given language is going to significantly influence the sort of typical applicant you get for a job working in that language. Those profile vary a surprising amount, especially for, as you say, niche languages, but also for "beginner" languages.
I have seen businesses significantly harmed because they hired what I would term language specific technicians instead of engineers. That's a failure of leader, certainly, but that failure is a lot more likely for certain languages.
I have seen this too, and I really like the way you phrased it - I think I'll use that in the future!
I do think it's an easier trap to fall into with some languages, but I still don't think the language really drives it.
I worked on a large-scale Rust project that could probably have been a Go project a while ago and while Language Technicians were a big hiring hazard, after we got one or two we both learned how to manage them and stopped hiring that type of employee (since they weren't what our project needed) and things evened out and were successful in Rust.
Yeah, in the end poor hiring practices drive it. The language you choose just makes the probability of that failure possibility higher or lower.
> I worked on a large-scale Rust project that could probably have been a Go project a while ago and while Language Technicians were a big hiring hazard, after we got one or two we both learned how to manage them and stopped hiring that type of employee (since they weren't what our project needed) and things evened out and were successful in Rust.
That tracks with my experience, for sure. Once you learn to spot it, you can mitigate it.
This and similar are common ideas for the people that never see the real whole world of programming, and maybe have the fortune of be in the "startup" circles.
I see the opposite, and is very good predictor to know how bad a product or a team is, using the programming language AND the main DB engine, but that is because I live in the world of "enterprise" code where for example:
* I'm called to do a rewrite
* I see the screenshot of the main app
* I guess correctly was made with vb (first big alarm) (how I know: I never see in my circle anybody that do vb, php, c, c++ anything resembling a sane UI. BTW just the use of colors was enough to guess)
* I worry, but confirm, that use Access as the main db
* I discover that part of the data was ALSO in a excel file, that is used with the equivalent of "joins", and was not surprised to see things like this
Even without knowing more about the people that do it, that is far enough signals to guess much.
BTW, there are very good predictors, if Use: MySql, MonGo, Php, Js (almost whatever you wanna add here in terms of frameworks), VB, Perl, Android (aka: Java android and android itself without using iOS alongside), is likely terrible. Then Java or C# taking turns how much worse, but not as bad as the ones before. I sweat if somebody say it use C or C++. Probably enough to straight refuse to take the project.
Any use of not-obscure tech in this sector and is a good predictor to be more or less not-that-bad.
BTW: Also complex infra and related boilerplate is now probably a stronger predictor after some langs like python, go, typescript and more modern java/kotlin/c# has spread (and also more pg and much less nosql, but too much "cloud")
Yes, you may not enjoy turning a legacy system that works into a nicely architected system, but the ones that get to that phase are clear successes IMO.
Contrast this with systems which had nice, clean, maintainable architecture from day one but bit the dust two years later.
The original article is a silly shill, as engineering managers have looked at economic cost of choosing a language and other technology since... forever.
And some of that "invisible" discussion happens visibly too (I've done that a number of times: "how do we keep our engineers motivated who want to explore a new hyped tech stack vs the cost of them being slower or leaving the company").
And because time to first release is often the difference between prosper and fail
It is not enough to be the best. You need to be the first
> the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent [Windows] NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that
Maybe first rate hackers don't play games. /s
If you look hard enough, you'll find exceptions of course. I think Ebay was built on Windows servers, but in the late 1990s, building your web startup on Windows was a sign that your technical leadership had bad taste and a competitor would run circles around you.
https://discord.com/blog/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to...
A possible reason for this is that our current languages are way too similar to make a difference.
Even most of the ones we think of as radically different.
To some extent! There are also cases where any decision is better than no decision, and all the options are good enough that it's not worth the delay to argue about them.
Where does that fit, in a company where there's only one techie? Not sure I get your comment here.
Also "good enough" is a very, very tempting and treacherous mistress...
Having that said I agree that language/platform is a "non technical requirement" in 90% of real world cases. You pick what you know or in more industrious scenarios - what's available on the market or what's the most cost effective.
But people are indeed irrational about programming languages. There's tribalism, stereotypes and preconceptions. Most notable is probably PHP, language for human failures and shit projects. As if same exact project written in Java was suppose to be of higher philosophical value.
But it's something you can't deny. I've been asked in non ironic way by a (non technical) founder investor if I could recommend him Rails programmers, because he read about it and it's suppose to be great. I asked him about specifics of his new project and he said he doesn't have an idea yet, but it has to be in Rails. Go figure.
There are of course a few scenarios where changing the programming language is a more defensible, less "always wrong" kind of thing. An extreme case would be something like a COBOL system that needs maintenance and you have trouble finding people who can do it.
I would argue that the number of successful companies with Python code bases is the best evidence that language choice doesn't matter.
I think a lot of the problem of switching isn't so much the language, but relearning all the undocumented lessons that were learned the hard way the first time around.
When Java came along its garbage collection blew my mind. I agree with the 4x factor.
- Systems languages with manual memory management, like C or Zig, where real-time/low-latency performance is important.
- Rust and its borrow checker, as an alternative to manual memory management.
- A strongly FP influenced language such as a Lisp or Haskell. Especially Lisp macros. Exceptionally good for working with structured data in cases where purity is more important than performance.
- The BEAM/OTP architecture for distributed systems (Erlang/Elixir).
- Languages with good CUDA/PTX/Vulkan support, for programs that need the GPU.
- Assembly. This was a much bigger deal in the past before compilers got good. Today good mostly for educational purposes.
I've rewritten a very large and complex macro assembler program into C. The original developers were gone. Nobody would touch that assembler code. I volunteered. The result was a program that could be maintained and could be ported to multiple diverse platforms needed by the company.
I tried to port Optlink (a linker for Win32) from assembler into C. It failed because the market for Win32 programming died, and so I abandoned the project.
My Empire game started out in BASIC. Then it was converted to FORTRAN, then PDP-11 assembler, then C on the PC, then D.
With that pov, I don't see any contradiction by saying the language is an important decision, and rewriting your project in a new language is probably a bad idea.
Then they turn around and claim that choosing a programming language is the most important thing you can do, and that you'll need to Like and Subscribe to learn more about it...
I've been through tens of rewrite projects, successful and unsuccessful, and seen projects and products at almost every scale, and I cannot agree that programming language choice is a primary driver in a product's success or failure. Even extending this thesis from language to framework and ecosystem, where there's perhaps a _tiny_ bit of signal, still doesn't really lead to a meaningful conversation. The main driver of a project's success is almost always driven by: the composition of employees working on the project, and the competence of the people architecting the project. Don't get me wrong - to an extent, some languages (especially more niche ones) drive hiring and what kind of employee you get, but this effect is dwarfed by who works on the project and how well it's managed.