Re:Average Income per Programming Language
by apgwoz on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @08:43AM
(#6249765)
The author of Real World Haskell has a startup that uses Haskell. I don't remember the exact quote, but it is in part to weed out crappy developers. http://functionaltalks.org/2013/06/10/brian-osullivan-runnin...
Jane St. Capital also does this to some extent by using OCaml, but I don't think that was the primary motivation.
PG has made similar comments about the use of Lisp. It doesn't really scale to the IBMs and Googles of the world, though.
This is key. If you think you'll want to or have to hire an 800 person staff then you're going to lose developer quality and will be served by picking languages which are already common on the market.
Even at the CTO level, languages and technologies more of a strategic business decision than a raw technical decision. Questions like:
* can we hire enough programmers of quality in this language?
* is there sufficient support available for these technologies?
* is the technology sufficiently mature?
Selection of a core technology can't be purely a "wow, cool" decision at that level, although it may factor in to what kind of programmers you are likely to get (e.g. see pg's old article "The Python Paradox" http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html)