Re:Seven Languages in Seven Weeks
by JoeAltmaier on Sunday October 25, 2009 @10:12AM
(#901609)
"Getting it" may be right for us (developers) but wrong for the company.
A florist that needs order tracking isn't trying to change the software world. That persuasive guy thats insists SmallTalk is gods gift to florists is NOT doing them a favor.
Perhaps not, but writing it in Java isn't exactly doing them a favor either as it increases time and cost for development and changes. The Right Thing for such a situation is probably a compromise between language power and popularity. Ruby or Python with one of the popular frameworks that makes half the decisions for you would probably be a good choice.
Will that eliminate 99/100 companies? Probably not that many but it will eliminate a lot, and you should be glad.
After my first job, I learned to always ask what a company is doing for source and configuration control. If they have no answer or a bad one (Visual Source Safe), that will tell you a lot about the environment.
Same thing if it's an MS shop that refuses F# or a java shop which refuses Clojure a priori.