2008-03-17 Happy St. Patrick's Day!
"It's not important which particular programming language you are using." Two people have said that to me in the past couple of days. I know exactly what they mean; I had my brain washed in one of Germany's best places to study computer science. It's not about the language itself. It's about the concepts. Once you understand what to do and why, you don't need to worry about the how.
And yet I cannot help thinking this might not be the ultimate answer. It's true for individual programmers, but what about whole companies? If the language doesn't matter, why in the world are there so many of them around then?
Once you set your mind on one language, you're stuck with it. In a real world project, it's absolutely impractical to translate everything to a new language. Equivalent as they might be, they're just not interchangeable. So what if you made a bad call, because you thought the choice of language isn't really that important? This is what's going to happen:
- The world keeps on turning, and you find yourself putting more and more effort into working around the actual core, because nobody understands how it works. Ever heard of Fortran?
- It will be hard for you to find qualified programmers, because not everybody is willing to use a language that sucks and therefore doesn't look impressive in their CV. Face it, programmers aren't going stay forever.
- There German word for it is Insellösung (island solution). It is always a bad idea.
So tell me, do you really think the choice of language is not important?
6 comments:
I wouldn't say (apart from a theoretical point of view) the choice of language or tool in general is irrelevant, as in 'it doesn't matter which one you choose'. I wouldn't say C++ is _the_ best programming language, either. I would argue that there might be a best choice (as in fit) of language for a particular problem. But then again, to solve a particular coding problem, you need two entities: a language and a programmer. So language A might be the obvious choice for solving problem B, if it just so happens that you know C(++) inside-out but don't have a clue about A, it's likely that C(++) is the way to go.
I am quite aware that this reasoning locks you in the 'solve everything with a hammer' dilemma.
I strongly agree with your concerns about company wide programming language selection. I guess if you made that choice once, you tend to stick with it, even across projects, especially, if you invented the language yourself... (The thought crosses my mind, you might be talking about Jade, here.)
Language matters. Absolutely. Undeniably. Terminally.
If you really like to earn money on programming, put COBOL-85 into your CV and send that to Citigroup.
Company-wide enforced language usage is death. No reason given. Just true.
Except if you are Microsoft, so you enforce languages worldwide and repeat that every few years.
Woah, I must have hit a nerve there!
@Axel:
Precisely! Keep an open mind and don't just repeat what your professor said. That's exactly what I'm talking about! Oh, and I didn't mean to write about Jade, but maybe I got carried away a bit there ;-)
@Stefan:
Citigroup? That's funny, Google says they have a "Stock quote for C". Apparently they don't have a stock quote for Cobol.
I have a huge disappointment for you - Citigroup doesn't hire COBOL developers in Manila at this time. You can have Ohio, New York or Bydgoszcz.
BTW, Weichhirn, "C" is the stock symbol for Citigroup@NYSE. Be sure to also try Weet-Bix Hi-Bran, Weet-Bix Organic and Weet-Bix Crunch!!!
Guess the stock symbol of the Ontario Mega Finance Group!
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