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by EECS 5501 days ago
The short answer is no. The only exception I can even think of in extremely rare cases where you program something in a language some company would not want to use and may potentially not acquire you for (which for most web languages it's not an issue), it should not dictate how successful your application is in terms of users, revenues, growth, and/or overall outcome of the company itself. You may run into scaling issues, maintenance problems, ease of training and transitioning new employees to code base or language as need, etc... but for most things, it wouldn't make much of a difference.

On the other hand, if you're asking flow of code, nuances of particular languages, available libraries, ease of hiring people, etc... to help grow what you're building, then it goes back to the age old language war debate.
1 comments
hkr 5501 days ago
What if you hire developers to maintain the code? Doesn't the more readable syntax affect the developers' performance?

(Honest question, not trying to start a programming language flame war.)

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EECS 5501 days ago
There are good coders, great coders, and just a bunch of awful ones. There's a difference in being able to code something that works, and something that works brilliantly, and even better at scale. That said, readability and good commenting in coding and documentation should apply in any language.

In Python for example, there's kind of a (mostly) default way of doing it. In other languages, not so much. But that doesn't mean the company culture can't push for something like this (a standard, at least to the extent in which a language permits doing so). Developers performance is more base on how they like working in a language (better to find true language agnostic developers), culture fit, personality, etc...

If you're outsourcing, that's a totally different set of traits and number of things to look for than if you're hiring in house (which I would recommend for the core team and in general anyway; hiring in house that is).

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chromatic 5501 days ago
Doesn't the more readable syntax affect the developers' performance?

What does "readable" mean? If "readable" means "I don't like sigils" or "operator overloading confuses me" or "everyone should indent their code the same way", I suspect you won't get any interesting answers.

Have the developers any experience in this language? Have they significant experience in this language? Have they any experience with the other developers? Have they significant experience in the problem domain?

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