[munk-a]

Close I think - the best language to use is the one you will have the easiest time hiring good talent for. If you found a startup and all really love and are fluent in COBOL that's great but... good luck when it comes time to hire another employee.

[paxys]

If you have a good product new engineers will learn whatever language it is in. This very article is a perfect example. I'm sure Slack isn't hiring kids out of college with extensive PHP experience.

[acomjean]

Php is pretty easy to pick up. We have way to many languages (Java ,Perl, php and python)

A lot of interns end up using php(symfony). If they know Perl or Java they can pretty much jump right in. Python they take a little bit though not much more.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

This is strange to me because I’ve taken and succeeded at two positions now where I didn’t know the language going in.

[munk-a]

I just wanted to clarify that I specifically called out how easy it is to hire for. A lot of developers are pretty quick when it comes to adapting to a new language and there are virtues that lean in favor of a language being easy to pickup: sharing a paradigm with popular language, sharing conventions with popular languages and good documentation.

I have yet to work a day job in Rust, but I've worked in Java, C++ and Go so I'd be quite confident applying to a Rust position as long as it wasn't specifically security focused... I would be less confident in how quickly I could pickup Prolog - I think my brain works well for the nuances of the language but I'm less certain.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Yeah, this is why I’ve concentrated on learning different kinds of languages in my free time, rather than learning the latest thing: if I know Python, Ruby is relatively easy to learn but Haskell is more difficult. So, it’s worth my time to learn Haskell rather than Ruby.

[rjyoungling]

COBOL.. lol so spoiled. It's machine code or gtfo! /s

[nullsense]

That's making a bold assumption you get as far as hiring.