Ask HN: How do you sell in a new programming language?

There seemed to be some openness to studying the alternatives, but ultimately it was hard to convince the powers that be that it was worth the effort to adopt a new language/technology.

So I quit. The only regret I have now is I didn't do it sooner. I wasted a lot of valuable time.

You basically have to appeal to emotions (they won't understand the technical argument or even care). But if it makes the product more stable, more easily extensible/customizable - that could work.

Good luck!

Rather than saying "We should reimplement our core products in $FOO" you can often achieve the result of using $FOO while hitting less resistance by implementing one-off projects or support systems in $FOO instead.

e.g. I worked at a Japanese megacorp and, despite us being a Java shop, one of the sales guys sold a customer on "We're certainly the right people to write documentation for your Perl program." This contract only required a bunch of HTML files as a deliverable, rather than getting a team of programmers to speed on something which would be maintained for 30 years, so I successfully convinced my boss that I'd jump on the Perl grenade if he let me use any means necessary to create the HTMLed documentation. I ended up doing it in Ruby. Then I had a "Hey boss remember that time I delivered a $X0,000 project in 1/4th the budget and made you look like an effing hero? I want to use that tech again" case study.

Though for the amount of time I spent on evangelizing Ruby and modern Javascript-heavy UIs at my previous company I could have launched my own. Eventually I did. It turned out to be a much better use of my time.

1. It helps if the language interoperates well with the existing platform. If you're at a Java shop, consider Scala and Clojure. Don't bother trying to sell it on Haskell; that'll never happen. But, for Scala or Clojure, the top 25% of Java developers are probably headed that way already.

2. Don't ask permission of nontechnical management. (Grace Hopper: it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.) Just deliver something cool in it that the rest of the organization can use. In the JVM ecosystem, no one needs to know that the JAR actually contains Clojure code. Get enough momentum behind the project that management actively wants you to demo it to the rest of the company. Then mention the "secret weapon".

3. After (2), get a job ad posted in the new language. The quality of applicants will be a lot better. Post a Java job ad, and you'll get more responses, but your phone-screen-to-hire rate will be about 2-5%. For a Clojure job, it'll be closer to 30%-- and 60% of those who actually know Clojure (those who don't will fail-fast on the phone screen). Not only can you reduce time wasted with unqualified candidates, but you're more likely to get a 10X hire. Now you can make the argument that it's worth hiring more people in the newer, better language.

You're not going to turn a large Java shop into a Clojure company. It just won't happen. But if you do the above and have a bit of luck, you might carve out a CoE (Center of Excellence, also known as an "honor's college", which tends to be an elite suborganization that has an R&D flavor) in the organization that uses it.

That above only works if your company has generally good management. (They don't need to be programming language specialists, but they need to be good at their jobs.) If not, you're not going to get anywhere no matter what you do and it's not your fault. Then, the best bet is to move on.