When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision. You're also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example, if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages.
There are too many great paragraphs in this article for me to quote them all. You really should read it.
I'm not sure I agree with everything 100% but it would be pretty dang close.
Quote from the article: "When I think about the great hackers I know, one thing they have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on anything they don't want to." That describes me. My mind refuses to cooperate if I try to do creative work on something I don't want to do. That's why I don't work as a programmer anymore. I don't want to work on other people's stuff.
ReplyDeleteI'd pick OCaml over Python, though, as my language of choice. I started a large project using Python, and left it for half a year, then returned. I found my own Python code as unreadable as my Visual Basic code used to be. That's when I started looking for another language and settled on OCaml. Now, I can come back to my OCaml code after a long absense, and quickly make sense of it. It has taken me a long time and a lot of searching to find a language I that I like. I'll use OCaml wherever possible. -vly3