Ask HN: How do you decide for a backend language?

> you won't be the first company dying from not finding any devs for your ageing Groovy on Grails stack

That's intentional on the part of the managers of those two products. When they were boosting the presence of Groovy and Grails in Java shops, they were increasing the complexity of their products. They're now cashing in by supplying consulting and conferences at tight market rates.

The lesson here is to check out whether the backers of the language have technical chops, or if they're merely business people.

"BS"? Ah, religious language wars again?

To me traditional means more like Algol, Fortran, PL/I, the original Basic, and maybe some more.

To me, the Visual Basic .NET (VB) Dim is, right, a bit obscure for now but, of course, back in the original Basic abbreviated Dimension for specifying bounds in arrays and was plenty clear. Microsoft may still be laughing at deciding to use Dim in VB. I regard Dim as a small mistake.

Finally to me, the VB Dim is like the PL/I Declare or the Fortran Real, Integer, Logical, Character.

For declaring (don't know a better term) in C, I can't gripe with just

int i;

IIRC that the syntax of C is idiosyncratic actually is somewhere in Kernighan and Ritchie.

In the example in Kernighan and Ritchie with declaring functions, the arguments, the return values, pointers to functions, etc., I couldn't get through the syntax. I'm sure there are a lot of C function declarations I couldn't proof read. Maybe if I worked and worked and ran a lot of test cases, I could understand it -- I'd also forget it by next week.

For loops I see Fortran's

Do i = 1, 10

as okay. The PL/I loops I like much better. In total what VB .NET has in loops is better still. The C loop syntax I don't like.

C wants to make a lot of use of their ++ idea, and I don't like it -- it's too sparse for me. One old excuse was that on some DEC computer being used at Bell Labs, there was an instruction for ++. I'm not impressed; to me, the most important reader of the code is me, not the processor!

Then where C permits

++i+++++j++

which officially in the language it does, I just gave up. Actually, when I tried that statement, two different C compilers gave different results. So, the C compiler writers can't understand the semantics of such syntax either.

I don't want to write, read, teach, debug, or bet my business on code with such syntax.

I've written some C, and I'll write some more if I have to, but I don't have to like it.

With C, having some syntax that is tricky to read seems too close to an actual objective.

It may be that some programmers regard VB as not manly enough. To me, VB is Microsoft's best language for applications programming and the code of my startup.

Well, put. I am borrowing it.