Adam Williams, creator of the sails framework, posted an interesting piece on choice of language. The basic premise is something I think most developers probably already know – choice of language isn’t really that important – but it was good to see it being said yet again. That it was taken from a Ruby proponent, about a move to Ruby, says a lot about that person’s level-headedness (Bruce Tate, I believe, is the author which Adam was talking about).
Most projects don’t fail for technical reasons. If you can’t solve your
communication problems, if you can’t control scope creep, or if you
can’t tell what the customer actually wants, the choice of programming
language is not going to matter to you.
This is the same sort of thing Hal Helms was saying years ago, and likely many people before him (I just probably wasn’t paying attention way back when!). The problems I’ve had on projects over the years almost always involved client/developer communication issues, not a developer being unable to figure out how to connect to a database or write to a file. I HAVE had a few issues working with other peoples’ code which truly wrestled with fundamental programming concepts – not understanding recursion, not understanding references, etc. Those projects have been scary, but thankfully few and far between.
