[010a]

The advantage of language constructs helping you, but the disadvantage of finding devs to actually build with them.

[d3ckard]

I learnt Elixir myself, on the job. It's certainly doable. Actually, if I ever had to hire developers, I wouldn't care at all about their previous language experiences. The only thing you achieve asking for n years experience in y is discouraging talented people who worked on something else.

The thing is, you choose right tech for the job and then reserve some time to bring everybody up to speed. From my own experience it is much cheaper than trying to use already know tech in ways it was not designed to work.

[davidw]

> The advantage of language constructs helping you, but the disadvantage of finding devs to actually build with them.

The flip side of that coin is you're liable to get someone reinventing the wheel - poorly - in whatever language doesn't have all those goodies.

[d3ckard]

Yep, Greenspun's tenth rule comes to mind.

[davidw]

In the Erlang world, we call that Virding's rule:

"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang."

Edit: I'll add, though, that the Go people are pretty smart and seem like they're doing good things, so I wouldn't be too complacent in thinking Erlang is the only game in town. It still does get some things right that are hard to replicate in Go, though.