[Seaside] another reason Rails gets market share andSeasidedoesn't

Ron Teitelbaum Ron at USMedRec.com
Fri Jul 20 15:19:56 UTC 2007


I haven't really been following this thread but this caught my attention.

> From: Jason Johnson
> 
> I never understood the big fear in learning new languages,
> or using them in your company.  Besides; it's a good way to weed out the
> kind of people you don't want to hire anyway (i.e. if a person can't get
> proficient in a new programming language in a reasonable amount of time
> they probably don't code well in the few languages they do know).

I've made this argument a number of times: The number of available
programmers for language X does not relate to the number of highly qualified
programmers.  I used this argument mostly to support using Smalltalk over
Java. The argument I always got back was that it does change the amount of
money needed to hire those people, it decreases the risk to the project, and
simplifies your support profile.  (Not to mention the guys at Bain and Co.
knew how to asses the risk of Java and couldn't really understand the risks
of Smalltalk enough to write up a complete audit for investors)

I've never really been able to counter those arguments and I've experienced
some of the downside.  I had a programmer that was just gaa gaa over
Borland's Delphi.  He really believed that it was the best possible gui
development platform out there and really wanted me to let him build an
application with it.  I relented and as you can probably guess we needed to
support that application after he moved on.  You are right that we were able
to support the application because of the quality of the developers, but
even small changes required a large amount of tinkering and learning that
would not have been necessary had I stuck to my guns and said no.

Ron Teitelbaum
President / Principal Software Engineer
US Medical Record Specialists
www.USMedRec.com 



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