Good engineers are hard to find, obscure languages are not a hindrance

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

So true:

The “hiring” problem
One thing that always pops up in discussions about somewhat marginal languages is the hiring aspect, and the fear that you won’t be able to find people if you “lock” yourself in a language decision that strays from the usual suspects. My experience is that when you tackle big problems, that go beyond simple execution but require actual strong engineers, hiring will be a problem, there’s just no way around it. Choosing people that fit your development culture and see themselves fit to tackle big problems is a long process, integrating them is also time consuming. In that picture, the chosen language isn’t a huge deciding factor.

I see marginal languages as a problem in the following organisations:

Companies tackling smaller problems, or problems already solved. These are right in choosing standard languages, if I built a team to build an e-commerce site I wouldn’t go to clojure.
Larger companies which want their employees to jump from project to project, which makes sense from a managerial standpoint.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://spootnik.org/entries/2012/07/04_another-year-of-clojure.html
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