This will be my approach this year. I have the advantage that I am not on the dev team, so I report to a VP who has given me autonomy in technical stack and architecture choices. I’m working on an internal yet highly-visible side project—i.e. not crucial to the business but everyone will see it (realtime dashboards).
The current one is in Node (which is also non grata here) but is not as reliable. Not because of Node, but because the MIS architecture is somewhat hacky from what I understand. Like cron jobs running ETL scripts and that’s it. And who is going to have time to build an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of OTP in Node?
The concern over hiring is real, and we have already been burnt by going with Lisp and Clojure in the past. The problem there is managerial and cultural.
Yes except, ironically, hiring devs for well-paved-road experience is also an issue as it makes it much harder to identify the good ones. But sure, leadership is free to hire an army of mediocre Java developers instead of a couple of good esoteric-language developers.
Well said. We hired Clojure developers under a Java-experienced dev manager who ended up reporting to a .NET-experienced technical but non-dev VP. And then they blamed Clojure.
Me neither, but I’m fairly new. Case in-point: was there any hostility in the Gleam thread? Quite the contrary I would think.
Then again, I should probably rewrite those last two sentences as they do seem a bit hostile due to their terseness and the rhetorical question coming across as sarcastic. Better would be to say “For example, I did not see hostility or zealous defense in the Gleam thread—even though static typing on the BEAM can be controversial and has probably been discussed ad nauseam in the past.”
I think that might be the issue here. We might like how that sounds but we can’t expect everyone to approach their projects with the rigor of a Ph. D. dissertation where all prior art has been thoroughly researched. But as Jose has said, it can get tiresome if it comes up over and over again.
And in terms of monoculture, it is perhaps true that there is an overcorrection here against the Node world where Yet Another Frobnicator Library is frowned upon if it is not clear how it moves the ecosystem forward.
Which, now that I am catching up on the thread, has been further discussed.
