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Comment by edwinnathaniel | Hacker News Reader

Colin could've re-written it using Java. He didn't do that because he doesn't like Java ;)

Language may have not be a huge deciding factor until it does.

My question is focused more toward the existing team that probably has some pretty good skill in, let's just say, Java and OOP and now they're turning 180 degree to pure functional like Clojure as opposed to Scala (not that I'm a big fan of Scala or anything like that, but just as an example).

If it were that easy to learn new languages, we wouldn't have issue with hiring as most of the job opening requires the candidate to know specific language however we would like to believe it was not the case.

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What do you think people will think when they read this?

"He didn't do that because he doesn't like Java "

Your words imply that somehow the preferences of the top engineers or CTO should not matter. But why should those preferences not matter? If we are talking about people who are talented, then we can start with the assumption that those preferences are probably the distilled wisdom of many years of experience with particular styles of development. We don't need to re-enact the millions of debates that have happened regarding whether Java is good or bad (One side shouting "It is verbose!" the other side shouting: "Type enforcement is good", etc, etc, until the last syllable of recorded time). It is enough to know that good engineers have preferences and those preferences probably have some benefits.

You also wrote:

"My question is focused more toward the existing team..."

What if the current team is terrible? Again, referring to Colin Steele, he fired/allowedd-to-leave the entire team that existed when he first arrived.

What if we turn your question around and ask it from the other side: is change ever justified? I'm guessing you would say "Yes".

By your statement that the preferences of the top engineers should matters is the time where "language does matter". It matters because it's a personal choice regardless whether it is the right choice or not.

"What if the current team is terrible" is not the focused of my question hence providing an example from Colin is arguably not in the right context of this discussion and I'm going to leave it to that because there's no point to discuss as anyone could have switched the underlying technology from Java to Ruby and fire all Java developers and hire Ruby developers.

Colin is a very specific example that is written by the man himself. The justification is sound. Having said that, I could pick some obscure language tomorrow (not that Clojure is these days) and forces my own preferences to go forward as long as I can reach the goal and claim in an article how my personal preferences were the best thing as well even though it may not be the case.

But nobody knows the truth... right?

I'm not trying to be negative here but at the same time no human willing to admit his/her mistakes to be honest. Especially when there are plenty at stakes.

Learning a new language _is_ easy for a good developers. I know of a lot of companies that are doing just that, trying to find good developers, and then train them on the fly in new language. And it works well for them.

The reason why some companies have "hiring problem" is that they require X years of experience with framework Y in language Z, although that language Z takes 1 month to master, and framework Y another two weeks.

Why are they doing it? Because HR is doing hiring, and because "hiring is problem" they get bigger budget for hiring, instead development department getting bigger budget for training.

All I have to say is this:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

It's true that you can't learn programming in few months, or even a year, but if you are already solid programmer learning yet another language or framework is easy. Heck, some of us are doing it just for fun.

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