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by rubylark 1236 days ago
I'll add an anecdote to contradict that argument:

I work in embedded, and the place I work restructured to have a dedicated software group. They hired young software engineers and focused on getting people who are good programmers without really caring what they were good at. Most people ended up being web developers and liked webstack.

We were tasked with making a handheld air quality measurement device with a touch screen that could pair with a computer app that we would also write. Most people on the team knew webstack so we decided on a HTML/CSS/JavaScript +SQLite that would run in Electron Chromium on Linux on the physical device.

So what went wrong? Well, electron is bloated for embedded devices and the mid-tier processor we were using chugged so much that it would get hot. Hot enough to affect the temperature sensors at the top of the board and throw off the gas density measurements. Our MVP was nearly done when we discovered this problem.

We had two choices: throw out the hardware or throw out the software. We ended up throwing out the software and starting over (in Winforms + C# if anyone's curious). I and two others quit as a result. It is _really_ depressing redoing something you've already done in a different language.

If we picked the lighter weight framework from the start instead of picking the language most people knew, we wouldn't have lost a year of work.