Ask HN: How do you decide to use programming languages/frameworks?

[slogsdon]

I've been trying languages recently to expand my toolset for web development and have touched Go, Erlang, Elixir, Haskell, Lisp Flavored Erlang, and Common Lisp in the past couple months.

Performance, expressiveness of the syntax, tooling, and community are typically what I use for my criteria. How about everyone else?

[biscarch]

Depends on the goals of the project, what other developers are on the project, etc. In other words, what am I trying to accomplish and how does what I'm using help me get there.

For example, I might use Elixir if I was trying to onboard Rubyists to a project on the Erlang VM or Haskell if I was building out an API with Riak (because I know the Riak client in Haskell is awesome and digestive-functors is nice to work with).

As for deciding to use (ie: play with) on the side. I'll try pretty much anything (J/Julia/mocl/Erlang/agda) if a project sufficiently captures my interest regardless of community/syntax/tooling/etc.