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by David Heinemeier Hansson.
Original Post: You're not just making a technical decision
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Paul Graham is the hacker's bard. He puts in eloquent words what can otherwise seem fuzzy. He's also a LISP programmer on a mission:
When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision. You're also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example, if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent choice to write it in Java.
But when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. [2] And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages.
That's the paradox of picking an off-mainstream platform. It's not harder, but easier to attract top talent. We witnessed this first hand when advertising for help on Basecamp. Triple-A programmers were falling over themselves to get a shot at working commercially in their language of love. They were the kind of guys were I'd feel like the freshman just arriving on campus.
Who cares if there's 5 million Java programmers? Or 3 million PHP programmers? You usually just need a couple for any project and with star talent being 10 times as productive as your average Joe Programmer, it's extremely important to get hold of that upper-echelon. And as Graham says, you're much more likely to find one of those in languages of love.
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