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Comment by kalterstern | Hacker News Reader

This is quite silly, of course. A solid developer has no problems switching idioms (not just syntax) when hopping languages.

There's really not much sense in an argument that says you "lose" something by learning newer things -- provided, that is, you're really making an effort to wrap your head around the newer things that you're studying, and not just cramming selected phrases and reflexes into your head in order to finish some current task at hand.

If anything he's become a better C# programmer, not a worse one, precisely because of his "bad" experience, because he now sees that overuse of certain habits can lead to bizarre or otherwise undesirable results (just like with any language).

So really he should be thinking positively about the whole experience, rather than negatively.

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I personally agree with TFA. Being able to change your environment is really key--I write Java in my job and it's just awful for me. I definitely lose motivation from knowing there are better alternatives.

He's not saying you lose anything, more that it's harder to use those things when you're constantly thinking about how wrong they are. Similarly, the overuse of certain habits is not always avoidable.

You should consider secretly using Scala or Clojure in order to see how long it takes for someone to say something.

I've thought about it--it's a rather small company, with generally smart people on the team. It might happen, but the problem is mostly political. I also need to learn more Clojure... (I've learned enough Scala to convince myself that I don't really want to learn it)

Scala is good if you have good programmers. Otherwise, it's painful, because they tend to write Java-in-Scala code. Also, it has a compile-speed problem that is tolerable in general but catastrophic if you have bad engineering practices (specifically, cyclical dependencies).

I just got back into Clojure after leaving my last job and the language (which was already very good) has gotten a whole lot better in the past 2 years. I recommend it highly.

Where do you live? What's the tech scene like in <X>? My wife and I are both ready to leave New York. We'll stay if I find something great, but I don't want to work in social media and my "job hopper" story (too many startups and consulting projects, NYC finance firms tending to perceive the latter as similar to short-term jobs even though they're not) is making finance annoying. (I can still get hedge-fund jobs, that's easy as crap, but there are few good ones and, besides, I like technology a lot better than finance.) Our short list is SF, Austin, Boston, but not limited to those 3 places by any means.

WRT Scala, of course I don't know much about it, but it just seems way too complicated for its own good. It's like the C++ of functional programming. I don't really want to invest that much time in it just to become somewhat fluent, and then trying to convince others to do so is pretty much a non-starter.

I'm in Austin, and it's pretty nice. I imagine you know enough about the tech scene already (perhaps more than me?). There are lots of opportunities, but the "good" software jobs are rather elusive (especially for a college dropout like myself).

FYI, Seattle, and too a small extent, Portland have a tech scene. But you probably have to like the PNW.

Portland has Galois, which may be up his alley.

Send an email to Yanis Varoufakis @ Valve. He's the economics guy doing analysis of in-game economies and applying various machine learning techniques to determine pricing strategies, etc. I suspect even if that doesn't appeal, there'd be a bunch of interesting work that could use someone with your background.

Wow, that's a great suggestion. Valve + finance + ML. I can't imagine a better fit off the top of my head.

That's an interesting approach! I tried more or less the opposite: wrote a patch replacing hundreds of lines of Java with dozens of lines of Clojure, then showed it to the team. It didn't work out so well. Here's an allegory that more or less parallels my experience: http://hack-tastic.blogspot.com/2013/04/most-people-who-grad...

Overperformance is dangerous in the workplace.That's a real risk of using high-productivity tools (e.g. functional programming languages). You're introducing gunpowder to horse-riding swordsmen. Usually, they'll lynch you for witchcraft.

"Clojure doesn't have the latest despondency infarction frameworks! Burn it! It's a witch!"

I think the trick is to fail up into a better company (or team, if your firm isn't one of those where a bad start renders you immobile) when that happens. Hard to tell how good a company is before you join, though.

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