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Comment by GrumpySloth | Hacker News Reader

Better for the others, but is it better for the scouts? Too often individuals are treated as drones obliged to work for a collective, which feels entitled to the work of the drones. From your perspective, they're not a good team mate. From their perspective, they're not part of your team.

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I think this example is being carried to extremes unproductively.

All being equal, it's better to have a team writing code that is useful to the system or project or whatever ASAP.

If an individual insists on prototyping in a language that nobody else can use, then they should either carry that prototype into the team's ecosystem, or start prototyping in that ecosystem and learn to be productive that way.

If option A, let's hope that "write twice" is fast enough that they are productive. If option B, they may take a productivity hit but will probably catch up.

The third option of "I'll do lisp you do <teams ecosystem>" is not very pro-social. Come integration and debugging and maintenance time, that Lisp-er is not in a position to help. That's an undue burden in the rest of the team.

I think you're excessively hung up on the example of everything happening within a single team inside a single company or some such thing, when the author of the submission wrote about making a choice for themselves. You don't start coding in Lisp out of nowhere when working in a Java shop on a CRUD app. But if you're charting your own course, it's great to be able to choose whatever suits you best.

I can't count the number of times someone published their open source project and inevitably people in the comments started questioning their language choices, because they wouldn't be able to use it in their "team", and how that choice is ultimately harmful for "the community". Now, you're not doing that exact thing here. I'm just thinking about how all that focus on "the team" and "the community" often goes too far.

Personally, I'm not going to do anything in Common Lisp, but I'm always happy seeing other people doing their projects in that language (and many others).

> I think you're excessively hung up on the example of everything happening within a single team inside a single company or some such thing, when the author of the submission wrote about making a choice for themselves.

That's fair.

> I can't count the number of times someone published their open source project and inevitably people in the comments started questioning their language choices, because they wouldn't be able to use it in their "team", and how that choice is ultimately harmful for "the community".

Yep - not paying means not entitled to anything. I agree there.

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