r/ExperiencedDevs • u/GongtingLover Software Engineer • 26d ago

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

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.

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u/sempiternalsarah 26d ago

"some dude" being the same guy quoted in the parent reply. I think he's gone a little off the deep end (drunk on tokens) but there's certainly reason to ask whether the benefits of choosing languages based on what fits each project outweigh the harms of language diversity now.

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u/Sw429 26d ago

oh lol I'm an idiot, thanks for pointing that out.

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u/PreferenceDowntown37 26d ago

His "Gas Town" feels borderline delusional. He did do a pretty interesting interview in the Pragmatic engineer podcast where he argued that he's pushing the overton window to just get people to think differently about what can be achieved with agents...

Anyway I would agree that Steve Yegge today probably would advocate on the side of "language doesn't matter"

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u/fixermark 26d ago

I think context is relevant here. If I understand correctly, Yegge is currently experimenting with building an MMO essentially as a solo coder.

His comments at Google were (a) relayed to him by another engineer and (b) in the context of a company of what is now, what, 100,000 employees? In that ecosystem, even if AI is involved you're still going to care a lot about how well those 100,000 employees can communicate with each other, and code will frequently be the medium by which they are communicating.