Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 03, 2006 at 09:45:54AM +0900, William Grosso wrote:
>> Here's the sermon: Pretending that decisions you don't understand
>> were made entirely for political reasons, or because the people making
>> the decision are stupid, is a sure-fire way to prevent yourself from
>> ever learning anything. Instead of indulging in free-form bile, why
>> not ask "What would have to be true for that to be the right decision?"
> 
> Perhaps you should read what I said a second, and maybe even third,
> time.  In paraphrase, it was (summarized):
> 
>   Regardless of how good or bad a decision a given language is for a
>   given task, Ruby is more likely to get you fired that Java.
> 


To be fair, it's not just corporate politics. Statistically, it's more 
likely a development house will have a strong base of Java developers or 
C# developers (C#, while being very young and so far an abomination unto 
Nuggan, is reasonably Java compatible), and that starting a Rails 
project means you'll probably have to get people with no Ruby experience 
on the team, or create a burden on the company in case the original team 
falls apart and quits to other companies regarding maintenance, or whatever.

While the programming language decision might or might not have anything 
to do with whether the project succeeds, choosing a *locally* unproven 
language DOES make the project inherently higher-risk, and makes the 
managers overall nervous - whence the likelihood of getting fired being 
higher. It's not punishment for your failure, it's more for all the 
other mess you could've caused even if the project succeeded, even if 
the management might not be consciously aware of that.

How good a language or the frameworks for it are to initially develop 
something in is not (maybe not by far) the most important factor when 
making a decision.

David Vallner