On Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:17:20 -0500, Brian Hurt
I think the "truck-factor" implications of the programming language as dwarfed by the implications of everything else in the project. Any project of any significant size is going to have a huge amount of project-specific information tucked up inside the programmers head. It doesn't matter if there are a million other programmers who know the language you used, or only a dozen- if you're the only one who knows how things were done, and more importantly, why they were done that way, and you get hit by a truck, then your boss has a big problem. Whether there are millions of candidate replacement programmers, or only dozens, none of them had the project-specific knowledge you had. Finding a replacement who knows the language is the least of his problems.
I believe that you're absolutely right. I also believe that corporate decision makers rarely, if ever, think that way. And that's the problem: You have to deal with the perception, not the reality. So, that's the real question that needs to be answered: How do you deal with the _perception_ that hiring a Haskell developer instead of a Rails, etc. developer will result in more chaos when said developer is hit by a bus? -Steve Schafer