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Comment by seglo | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry you interpreted it that way. It wasn't a disaster and internally the general consensus was that it was a great success. I've made some amendments to my post to provide some more context to our initial process change.

Thanks for the feedback.

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I might have read too fast, and might have some serious bias here because I actually prefer C# and .NET over anything else (and like leaving performance issues to be dealt with caching / rather than introducing complexities) - but it seems like you went from using a familiar, predictable, and very popular stack to embracing a dozen different smaller and lesser known technologies all full of interoperability issues, idiosyncrasies, and each requiring very specific domain knowledge.... All because a single person at the top is ideological about OSS instead of practical about solutions.

Though maybe that's what was required to get a buyout or merger, in which case that's what you needed to do due to the environment/culture of the other party...

http://www.empathica.com/press-release/mindshare-technologie...

The process change was top down, yes, I think that's the only way it could have succeeded IMO. However, the Scala change was bottom up and by developers.

The Mindshare acquisition is a recent event that postdates our technology change (Sept 19).

How did those "developers" choose that change if a lot of them disagreed and left later on? There had to be 1-2 leaders who happened to be Scala-fans.

We had two teams in separate physical locations. We worked together occasionally, but most of the time projects were fully staffed at one location or the other. The Scala change was fully supported at one of the office and not the other.

It wasn't too difficult to convince the CTO that Scala was the right choice. He's a big OSS advocate. From a technological perspective we were trusted to make the right decision.

I think what really sold the the rest of the management team was how much money we could save in licensing fees.

> I think what really sold the the rest of the management team was how much money we could save in licensing fees.

Come on, ...Microsoft licensing costs are a rounding error compared to the cost of developers.

Well, some people are trying to save money even on free soda for developers - there were articles on HN.

I'd say you're right if the OP moved to something like Haskell (which is an excellent language, by the way).

Scala enjoys all the benefits of JVM ecosystem, which is arguably more familiar, predictable and popular than C#/.NET. That and the incredibly rich selection of OSS libraries.

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