[_bxg1]

Even among "great minds", narrow domain-specific knowledge can matter. The nuances of how to squeeze performance out of the JVM, the exact assembly generated by some C code, etc. There's a difference between being able to use a language and being able to take full advantage of it.

There's also something to be said for language idioms as a means of communication and shared documentation within a team. Someone who speaks French and Italian may have no trouble picking up Spanish, but might say things that lose meaning when translated literally until she's gotten more immersed in the culture surrounding the language. One of your "great minds" may pick up C# and try to use it like Clojure, or vice-versa, and create enormous friction within the codebase.

Not that this is necessarily the dominant factor in these decisions, but it is a factor, no matter how intelligent and experienced your hires are.

[mnemonicsloth]

> Even among "great minds", narrow domain-specific knowledge can matter.

Yes, but it never matters at first. The first thing you do, always, is hack a prototype together. Computers are fast. Basic algorithms and data structures are usually good enough. You don't optimize until you've got what you want in principle. And sometimes you don't optimize at all. The internet is full of prototypes that escaped into the wild and then attracted enough users that they became irreplaceable.

Javascript is a good example. The version we have is several versions too early, and it's warty. JS would be a much better language if someone had paid more attention to the low-level details. But I would argue that JS is a huge success in spite of this. An awful lot of work has been done in JS, including work that couldn't have been done in most other languages.

The grandparent of this post is right that ideas are the important thing. JavaScript succeeds because it borrows good ideas from Scheme and Self.

[dotbmp]

Yeah, the "Great minds" are still going to have a bigger lead when it comes to understanding language details, which are trivial semantic implementation concerns compared to understanding concepts. Programming itself is the boring part; it's merely transcription of concepts into machine-legible code. The concepts themselves, many of which are not even limited to the domain of computer science, are where all the interesting content is to be found.

When I say boring, I mean relatively; there is some "puzzle solving" merit to programming per se. But this is mere mechanics and minor compared to the experience of manipulating ideas into practicable forms before writing them out in code.