this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Programming
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Choosing a language for a project because it's "cool" is so stupid
Let's try not to insult other people’s preferences.
In a way though he's right, picking a language because it is "cool" is the wrong reason to pick a language. You should be looking at other things like performance, scalability, security, functionality and see if those facets align with the requirements for your project.
When doing a project where those things matter - sure. But if it’s your hobby protect you can do anything
Yeah, that's fair enough, I'll agree to that.
I think the challenge arises when your hobby project gets funding and thousands of people start using it... But at that point the codebase is likely locked into many previously made decisions.
Yeah. People really should be allowed to make things in whatever technology they prefer, but at the same time I can't help but wince when I see infrastructure such as Mastodon or Matrix Synapse being written in slow inefficient languages like Ruby and Python.
It's really bad for the strength of decentralized networks like Fedi when I have a friend telling me "I wish I didn't set up Mastodon because my tiny instance needs multiple gigabytes of RAM". I might have set up a Matrix homeserver myself by now if Synapse wasn't Python and notoriously slow. I immediately discarded Kbin as a choice (among other reasons) because it's PHP and Lemmy is Rust.
Always easy to say "hindsight is 20/20", but still.
Well you can’t know what you don’t know. So if you start a project and foresee thousands of people use it in scalable manner - yeah you’ll use something faster but then your project might die before getting “in the wild”… but if you’re just nerding out with your friends you just want to have fun… and then suddenly thousands of people want to use your project… there’s just no winning
No it's not. If I work on something in my free time / voluntarily, I want to have fun. I want to enjoy it. If PHP pisses me off but Rust thrills me, of course I choose Rust. That's the freedom you have if you start a project. That there are more maintainers and even a bunch of contributors underlines that it was the right choice.