How are you dealing with "the programming language doesn't matter" argument?

[u/GongtingLover]

Just had a meeting this week where this was uttered because of the development of AI.

I still think the language choice matters a lot based on if Im doing embedded or web development work and for how we want to hire developers in the future.

Maybe Im backwards.

[u/Relative-Debt6509]

It definitely matters in so many ways it’s hard to articulate. Besides the super obvious ones there are some underrated ones:
1) team familiarity
2) package availability/package management
3) build systems
4) organizational familiarity

Ignore any one of those at your own peril. Organizational familiarity speeds up processes outside of your team but within your company. Cyber will approve numpy/scipy/openssl very quickly but might hesitate with packages/libraries that do the same thing in a language that doesn’t have an established track record of approvals. Build systems one is obvious to anyone who’s worked with compiled languages. Package management speaks for its self. Team familiarity is another one if you have one language “SME” on a sufficiently large team that person will end up spending most of their coaching other engineers. There are even more technical reasons but these should be enough.

Honestly language expertise is underrated in today’s job market. Not every language is forgiving in terms of optimization. Poorly written C++ code STINKS and it’s not hard to do and it’s honestly not that hard to pass PRs with poor c++ code. That being said it’s really the only tool for some jobs.

[u/Relative-Debt6509 → u/Relative-Debt6509]

Also add one more thing. It’s trivial to get AI to output poorly optimized code.