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Comment by water8 | Hacker News Reader

OCaml vs All: Good luck finding developers that will write quality code and not cost a fortune each.

If Jane Street can teach OCaml to traders, I can teach it to developers. That's not a concern for anyone other than a sweatshop.

If Jane Street can teach OCaml to traders, I can teach it to developers.

You can if they are motivated to learn. Unless you are offering Jane Street levels of compensation; and in return, the candidate is willing to believe, or pretend to believe that company's shtick about OCaml being so categorically superior as a general-purpose development language so as to leave all the others in the dust -- most likely they won't be.

Or if, you know, they were hired to work on a project where they get paid a salary. That seems to incentivize most devs.

Not "a salary", but a Jane Street salary and resume cred. Otherwise you just won't find that many takers.

I can assure you I will and in fact have found plenty of takers for my job postings with a niche language. You just need to word the postings appropriately and be willing to teach people what they don't know.

You just need to word the postings appropriately and be willing to teach people what they don't know.

OK, I'll grant that if you have that "magic skill" then you can in fact recruit developers for niche languages.

Most companies don't, as we know, and frankly it's amazing to me how incoherent their communications are throughout their so-called hiring process.

If having sensible hiring practices is a 'magic skill', then I guess call me Harry Houdini!

Per this person's experience (which seems sadly far from atypical), you might as well be:

https://www.benjamistan.tech/2022/06/26/wasting-time-in-tech...

Actually, what I found more impressive is that they also got them to use emacs.

Good luck finding high quality cheap developers in any language really. Very few good developers are language specific so unless your HM is an idiot and actively screens out candidates without 10 years of previous experience in the specific framework you're using it won't be a limitation. If you want quality developers you need to offer either 1) lots of money, 2) amazing benefits, 3) interesting problems to work on. For many, an interesting language can provide an edge. I chose my current company because I would be working on Scala here as opposed to Java with the other offers I had. The quality of life improvement of the Scala position was enough to take it over the prospect of writing AbstractFactoryBeanImpl for the next few years.

> Good luck finding developers that will write quality code and not cost a fortune each.

You pick one regardless of language. Not sure what's your point here.

It's not getting things done that matters. It's feeling superior to others that matters.

Hey, it's not a feeling. It's a fact.

It is certainly a fact, that you feel superior.

I would like to confirm that fact, by comparing productive output..

Define "productive output".

Producing code, that primarily solves the real world problem (not aesthetic ones).

What kind of code? People who want to solve real-world problems treat programming languages like tools in their toolbox. In the past week at work I wrote Scala, HTML, JavaScript, YAML, and Terraform. I also remove tons of code from my production systems whenever I get the chance as it solves a real-world problem for me (maintainability of the code base).

'Producing code' to measure 'superiority' is about as useful a metric as counting lines of code to measure productivity.

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