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Comment by codeonfire | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else see dedication to a single language as a flaw? When I read "X is a Y language company" all I can think is "that company has a long ways to go." I imagine the people or person there, having found their favorite pet language and some political energy, forcing it upon everyone else and I feel angry. I get recruiter emails "looking for a Java developer" and have to ignore them. The companies just don't get it. Language Y is not going to fit all needs and cases except for very, very small problems. A company dedicated to one language is like a Popsicle with dirt all over it.

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I agree with you but I also believe there needs to be limits. I like Google's strategy of N approved languages.

From an operational perspective there's too much overhead to effectively running any language in a production environment.

From a maintenance perspective you want to have common skill sets between a large intersection of employees so you're not the only person doing bug fixes on a system.

There needs to be a balance for sure.

Good points. I took over management of a software development group that had a four server commercial product that was dependent upon having developers knowledgeable in all of the following: Windows, Linux, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, C++, C, Java, C#, PHP, Perl, Bash, and Javascript.

The development team was very siloed. Nobody could work on anyone else's code, not even a little bit.

When a new developer approached me with a module that he had written in Jython, I almost lost it.

Not sure where you're getting this. The article says they currently do a lot of Ruby work, and they're moving to Clojure for most new back-end projects.

It also talks about how Trapperkeeper works with Clojure, JRuby and Java modules.

You may well be right about single language companies, but I'm not seeing any evidence that Puppet Labs is one of them.

CircleCI is a Clojure company from day one, so there was no need to force it on people. We've found a lot of advantages from this, not just on the code side but also from recruiting.

One problem we've had is that our frontend isn't clojure/clojurescript (its coffeescript+haml+knockout). In theory that means its easier to find frontend developers and designers. In practice it has meant creating a frontend/backend division where the backenders in particular don't like to work on the frontend. We testing out whether a move to clojurescript (and hence being a truly one-language company) will solve that.

Your comments apply to the HN link text, not the article or headline.

Puppet Labs isn't a single language company.

Yes, the submitter broke the HN guidelines by editorializing the title. On the other hand, the article's official title is uninformative. So I replaced it with the sentence from the article that most seems to describe its content (shortened to fit 80 chars). If anyone can suggest a better title, I'll change it again.

Not sure if you're the one who changed it, but the " Trapperkeeper is a new Clojure framework [...]" title works fine and is much less misleading imho.

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