[williamcotton]

So every new language is written be a fool on an ego trip? Or are you calling me the fool?

I'm having a very hard time separating what seems to be a painful personal experience from a productive conversation about the future of programming languages.

[hinkley]

    - Hard to onboard new hires
    - Code breaks because of lack of understanding of dependencies
    - Code changes become harder to manage

Anyone who finds these problems improved by a DSL isn’t spending time looking at what is actually making life hard for their coworkers, and therefore arrogance.

What helps me with those problems is tool selection. Picking community supported tools that fight some of these problems by allowing me to hire people who already know part of our system, and who can use a wider community as a knowledge base instead of just internal folks who have run off to work on other interesting things and don’t have the time anymore for something cool they did three years ago.

A veterinarian explained part of the dynamic to me quite some time ago: it’s better for your emotional relationship with your pet if a stranger does an uncomfortable procedure rather than you. If we use a tool with poor support at least we can bond over it as a team. If it’s Steve’s baby and he’s terrible at support that animosity turns inward, which is not just a problem, it’s the beginning of the end.