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Re^2: Choose the most powerful language

by CountZero (Bishop)
on Jun 14, 2004 at 20:24 UTC ( [id://366680]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: Choose the most powerful language
in thread Choose the most powerful language

I read somewhere that most programming is done in (Visual) Basic. So if you are looking to get the most resources (including programmers), your best bet should be Visual Basic! But is Visual Basic the best language for the job you want it to do? Who knows? It will depend on the job at hand, but from a management perspective, you are almost assured that you wil find someone reasonably adept in maintaining your VB code, many years after the original programmers have left your company. Lisp may be far superior (I don't know enough of it to make any statement in this respect) to VB or any other language, but if you have to look far and wide to find a programmer to rescue your program and are not guaranteed to find h[er|im] within a reasonable span of time, you're toast as will be your company.

The interesting thing which was written in the article tilly referred to, was that Yahoo seems to have switched from Lisp to C++ now ... 'nuf said.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

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Re^3: Choose the most powerful language
by tilly (Archbishop) on Jun 27, 2004 at 01:02 UTC
    There is no question that a mainstream language is a "safe" choice. No problems finding programmers, and lots of other companies you can point at doing the same thing if things go wrong.

    The point of the original article is that there are times when the risk of going with a non-mainstream language is worth it. One of them is the case of a small startup where the founder (or someone close to the founder) is familiar with the language, and the language is very productive.

    But try that in a larger company, and if anything goes wrong you're in trouble when people start questioning whether your odd choice had anything to do with the problem. Whether or not you chose wisely, you'll be a convenient target after the fact. :-(

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