[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
Re: Dylan Projects
not.for.spam wrote:
>
> Nope. 20% is not enough. Do you have any good reasons for doing even
> a small percentage of your work in a bad programming language? It seems
> so wasteful in so many ways.
>
Well, let's see.
1. It can be fun. I once rewrote a bank's loan officer front end entirely
in 80X86 assembler (yes, I had too much time on my hands). It was certainly
wasteful, but it was also interesting and challenging.
2. I can't get paid as much as I want to get paid writing Lisp (if I were a
great Lisp programmer I probably could, but I'm not). AFAIK I can't get
paid at all for writing Dylan. I could probably get paid reasonably well
for writing Smalltalk, but I'd have to adopt a nomadic lifestyle, following
Smalltalk work around the country. I'm 42, I have a family to support, I
need to make a pretty substantial amount of money to support them in the
style to which they (and I) have grown accustomed.
3. I work as a consultant. I enjoy it. I like the variety, I like helping
people out of a jam, I like the way clients hang on my every word. I'd
rather concentrate on what I do well (designing systems and helping clients
navigate the increasingly complicated IT solution space) than have to worry
about taxes, insurance, marketing, and the myriad other details that an
independent needs to deal with, so I need to be in a firm.
A downside is that I don't always have control over every aspect of a job.
I may be coming in in the middle of a project. The client may have an
enterprise architecture that mandates the choice of a particular language.
My company may want to use a language for which they can easily provide
skilled developers. For many reasons, I don't always get to use the
language that I believe to be the best overall choice for a particular job.
4. Even if I do have total control, I have an obligation to put the
client's interests first, and
that often means that I choose a language or toolset that you would probably
call "bad". In my last project I used a lot of C. My choice. The reason?
They were constantly migrating to the latest, greatest box and OS version,
and I knew that, no matter what, I'd always have a C compiler.
References: