Comment by Jenk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jenk | Hacker News Reader

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Weirdly my perception of Java (and C#) is actually a bit of what you describe, but often a lot more one of drifters who know/care just enough to get a salary and continue to drag their bad legacy habits and patterns with them from role to role.

The more esoteric a language is, I find the more _passion_ the average developer has for that language, it's libraries, and tooling.

Now I'm not saying the passionate Java and/or C# devs don't exist - they certainly do, C# is my bread-and-butter and I like to think I still have a flicker of passion for my work - only that there is a vast ocean of driftwood developers making it more difficult to find the sharks.

Haskell (my perception of), for example, has demonstrated some of the strongest devoted (to themselves _and_ Haskell) developers I'm yet to meet. That market is just nothing but developers who love their toolset and just want to write and learn amazing code.

> That market is just nothing but developers who love their toolset and just want to write and learn amazing code.

The risk with this type of developer is they often prioritize their toolset and amazing code over the actual businesses needs. I’ve seen it lead to the wrong tool being used for the job.

A couple years later when these devs move on the business has a harder time maintaining the code they leave behind.

There are always drifters to be hired, which has some value.

Yes it is very much a double edged sword. The other risk associated with highly passionate Devs is that one day the work your business values no longer accommodates what tooling they want to work with, or they themselves change tack sporadically after discovering something new. I've had amazing JavaScript developers quit on me because they got bored of using react and wanted to pursue a role in Vue, for example.

But I'll take hiring (and the implied difficulty in finding) a dozen of those kind of Devs over drifters all the same.

> The more esoteric a language is, I find the more _passion_ the average developer has for that language, it's libraries, and tooling.

If they weren't passionate, why use an esoteric language? If you want an easy time, something mainstream will be easier. It isn't like anything is actually impossible to implement in C; there are just trade offs in number of bugs and time to implement. Both of which are minor impediments vs algorithm and program architecture. Anything newer than C is just bonus modern features.

> If they weren't passionate, why use an esoteric language?

Because it is kitsch. Ruby suffered this fate in the mid 00s IMHO. It gained a lot of traction because of Rails and suddenly the recruitment space is flooded with hacks and bootcampers.

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