Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages

The story at the beginning proves that choosing your VP is significantly more important than choosing a PL.

I dunno. I take the position that language designers have blind spots around the weaknesses of their languages.

Python: Python is almost a hard-compiled language. Most of the dynamic stuff that's really hard to compile isn't all that useful. But Guido and his enablers love the dynamism, and the CPython implementation. So instead of PyPy taking over, we have CPython with hacks to call C.

Go: The "share by communicating" thing in Go works out about as well as it does in other languages, that is, it's useful but not central. Early on, there were tortured examples of implementing locks with queues. Nobody does that any more. People pretty much write Go like they do other languages, with shared state and locks. Queues are used when queues do something useful. The real strength of Go is that the libraries needed for webcrap are maintained and used by Google, so they're all well-tested and exercised. Also, goroutines/green threads eliminate the sync/async distinction. Garbage collection takes care of most ownership problems. Simple. (I recently wrote a web back end in Rust. Big mistake. Should have used Go.)

Rust: The "traits" system is an overreaction to Objects Are Bad. Rust probably would have been better off with single inheritance, which is well understood. (Multiple inheritance has too many dark corners.) People keep trying to do OOP with traits, which is like pounding a screw. Rust still doesn't have a good solution to the back reference problem, as I point out occasionally. The macro language sucks, but then almost all macro languages suck. "Async" is a nightmare but necessary to keep the Javascript crowd happy, since that's all they know. If you really need complex multiprocessor concurrency, Rust is currently the best game in town. Most people don't.

C++: They can't take anything out, and the cruft is too deep. "Modern C++" is not all that bad, but all of bad old C/C++ is still in there. So the safety situation remains awful. The cumulative complexity is now so high that even long-time language lawyers are giving up following it.

Javascript: Who thought that would rule the world? It's awful, but everywhere. Heroic efforts have made an inherently slow language go fast. It's kind of impressive, actually.

I think you missed something...

> ... or there are underlying reasons for a language shift.

As to "best language" that is just as dogmatic as anything else... just look at the C/C++ vs. Rust divide in the Linux community.

I think you are overestimating the value of a best fit language for any given task, especially those where there are a half dozen popular languages that more people know well that can do the job good enough. Don't build for a sky scraper when all you need is a birdhouse.

Also, MOST engineers aren't particularly talented. If you're fortunate enough to be working for an organization where everyone is a rockstar, that's great... for those doing bog standard CRUD apps for business, you don't get rockstar money, and you aren't finding rockstar talent. You get what you get and make the pest of it.

In nearly three decades, I've once, only once worked a project where I didn't have to explain a relatively simple concept to someone, where everyone on the project delivers their pieces in time and all were talented. It was wonderful. Then new management gets stacked on top, all the job roles are reclassified to mid level developers and everyone rolls out of that group.

A lot of the actual experience is literally explaining public/private key usage to other developers who manage to (re)use the same keys from dev to all the production deployments. Or a pissing match with the "security expert" who doesn't understand that your app's use case is different than the in the box security script that is failing, because your /login route is a different app from / and the bogus query params don't matter.

The great team would not have written the Amazon clone in Fortran. There is no engineering justification for such a choice, and "we are swaggeringly awesome engineers who can conquer anything" is not even remotely an engineering justification.

In my first post, the example I really wanted to use was people picking Go for their top-end, competitive-with-anything-in-the-market database. I choose Python just because anyone who would argue that is a good choice is clearly not someone who is in a position to see reason. But I think Go is a serious mistake... it's just one that lets you get to market, unlike Python which never would. But it's still going to end up holding back the company that makes that decision in the end.