[cempaka]

As a method for choosing a language, doesn't this just inherently skew to the smaller and more simplistic one, which may not necessarily be the best for all tasks or over a longer run where the techniques of the more involved language could be learned?

It's like hiring a new farmhand and saying, "here, dig two 3 foot holes, and we'll see what takes you longer, this shovel or an excavator you have no training or experience with," and then concluding the shovel is superior for all digging tasks from that point on.

[dogleash]

> As a method for choosing a language, doesn't this just inherently skew to the smaller and more simplistic one, which may not necessarily be the best for all tasks or over a longer run where the techniques of the more involved language could be learned?

pmuch.

I migrated a team off of an aging enterprise application to the product that was rapidly gaining popularity in industry. I had some expertise and believed in it, I won't name products (and it wouldn't mean anything to HN anyway) but this was a painfully obvious change. We were the pilot project at the company, and went though 6 months of most users struggling. It was about 18 months after adoption that my boss told me he felt like the new product was both better and that the slow down had been worth it.

Life isn't long enough for too many of those experiments. Not everything takes that long. And the experiment could have failed. But the experience really put lots of decisions into perspective.

There's a saying that nobody uses technologies that their boss didn't learn in college. Factually inaccurate, quite astute in message.

[cogman10]

It skews towards languages that the developer is familiar with.

Kotlin, for example, is a decent bit more complex than java is. It has a lot of new concepts to learn.

Yet, most Java devs can be productive with kotlin in a day or two. Even with the added concepts, it's not that different of a language.

The same is true of C and C++. A C dev could jump into C++ pretty quickly (even if they are just writing C with classes to start).

Your analogy is more like "Dig a hole, here's a shovel and here's a post hole digger". The familiar tool will likely go faster than the unfamiliar tool. And, as it happens, most devs are highly familiar with imperative programming styles, not so much functional programming paradigms.

[tornato7]

Potentially. Devs might get up and running with Scratch even faster than Go. But I'm assuming the OP already determined that Go or Clojure would work well for the task.

Go probably has a leg up on Clojure for reputation in production projects, considering Docker, K8s, Terraform, InfluxDB, and Geth are all written in Go. The biggest ones I can find written in Clojure are Puppet and CircleCI.

[pg_1234]

Go is basically C with training wheels, THAT CAN NEVER BE REMOVED.

It accelerates junior devs to production ready at the expense of everyone else.

It really feels like a language designed by people with utter contempt for those who actually write code.

[bzzzt]

If those people who 'actually write code' wouldn't have sprinkled their code with race conditions and buffer overflows maybe C would still be used widely for business apps, but reality is C code, while highly efficient, carries more risks than languages with training wheels. It's not contempt, it's coping with a reality where you can't afford to disqualify half of the programmer population because they're 'too junior' while there is an extreme shortage of workers. There's even a shortage of programmers for languages _with_ training wheels here...

[pg_1234]

It's a language for white-collar sweatshops ... more so than Java ever was.

Ultimately this is a disservice to those with any talent as it leads to a work environment where they are relegated forever to the lower ranks (unless they give up coding and move into management).

[bzzzt]

I don't believe it's got anything to do with talent. The wiser programmers I know don't get emotional about 'training wheels' but try to prevent errors by systematically and automatically fixing weak spots. It's not about contempt but about making sure after you make a mistake nobody ever makes that same mistake again... Footguns are a waste of time regardless of how good you are at avoiding them.

[Veraticus]

I would say it skews towards languages that are easy to be immediately productive in, which is certainly one of Go's biggest strengths.

[andrewpolidori]

It feels to me more like giving them the choice of two excavators one with many more options that are unnecessary and one with simple easy to grok basic controls