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Ask HN: How do you choose programming language for codebase?

2 points| ala | 8 years ago | reply

I have an idea for an enterprise cloud based solution. Since I'm not technical I will have to outsource development. How do I decide which programming language to get it built in? What are the pros and cons of what you suggest?

2 comments

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[+] baystep|8 years ago|reply
Reliability of the language and tool sets is a big one. Availability of coders in the language is another, there's an over abundance of C++/Java coders looking for work, but finding a team of Rust developers is a bit trickier.

Also in general, I would start with a list of languages that are built-for, or can easily support, what your product is. For instance, I love Go but wouldn't use it for a GUI application.

And in honesty, managed languages are a bit better in my opinion for projects that will require many devs to work on it. As much as this statement might catch flack, C++ is wonderful and powerful and I trust my ability to use it; but do I trust the workforce to? It's very easy for a dev to write a patch fix that also manages to introduce a memory leak or null pointer and crash the whole thing.

[+] Chyzwar|8 years ago|reply
Depends on the problem you want to solve and product requirements. Often it is better to let the technical person choose.

Unless you have tons of money you should avoid niche technologies/frameworks/languages. Solid choices include Ruby, Elixir, Python, Kotlin, Java. On frontend Typescript with React/Angular/Vue.

Technology is a secondary choice anyway. Most important is to find great engineers. These would naturally gravitate towards better tools anyway.