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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

You'd lose that bet. I think it's easier to reason about problems in languages you are familiar with and that fit how you think, which can change through continued use. A lot of the other stuff is just post hoc rationalization about why we like these languages and why they are better.

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The opposite of my experience. I have many more years of experience and am far more familiar with in the target language than Clojure. But for the really difficult computational problems, say, for example, particular performance analysis of a sensor network for a given time series, I reach for Clojure.

Same. Clojure is very, very good at expressing data and data transformations in a simple, concise way. Once I learned to reason in Clojure, it quickly became the language I prefer for playing with a fuzzy problem.

Surely the argument being made here is for the best prototyping language, not the most familiar. If familiarity was the only yardstick nothing beyond C would even exist.

The argument being made is if it's necessarily efficient to prototype in a different language than the one that will be actually used, especially if one is more familiar with the target language.

In a world of options where an experienced programmer has had a chance to experiment with different languages the most familiar language is the best prototyping language. In a world where C is the only option programmers think about what other options they could imagine.

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