[BangPypers] [OT] language fanaticism

[Dhananjay Nene]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dhananjay Nene <dhananjay.nene at gmail.com> writes:
>
> [...]
>
> > I suspect it all boils down to whether I value my time and my
> > customer's money over or under my preferred language. Once thats
> > clear - the path ahead also is.
>
> This brings in another variable which is the customer (and therefore
> money). That can alter the stakes quite a bit.
>
> Suppose you were doing something on your own time (like setting up a
> blog), would you rather choose something already built (like wordpress
> or jekyll) or write your own django app *just because the others are not
> in your favourite language*?
>
While that would definitely raise the probability of me doing it in
one of my favourite languages, I would decide that based on
opportunity cost. ie. if it takes me x hours to set up a wordpress
blog and y hours to write / custom craft my own (y being orders of
magnitude bigger than x) then I would trade it off with what else
could I do in those y-x hours.

Looking back, if I assessed that I would get to learn a lot about
something thats on my yet to learn list - I would go write that
blogging platform myself. Else I would use wordpress and use the time
to learn something else. But thats also driven by the fact that I
value learning something new much more than the satisfaction (without
substantial incremental learning) of programming something in the
environment I find most enjoyable.

Dhananjay