Re: Do everything in Java…

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 4 December 2014 at 13:47, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> It's an argument for Java over Python specifically but a bit more
> general in reality. This stood out for me:
>
>
> !…other languages like D and Go are too new to bet my work on."
>
>
> http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everything.html
>

Actually, I kind of saw it more as an argument to use only one
language.  And in a way I've fallen into that pit too, where:

1) Everything written by the devs I support at work is in Java.

So when it comes to new technologies, anything that isn't in Java
becomes a maintenance burden on me, so eJabberd backend becomes
Openfire, some perl IMAP scripted interface becomes Apache James, etc
- because these Java tools integrate with little work.

This occurred naturally out of the systems team I spearhead departing
from the developer role it was in the past.

2) Write everything in Python.

Whilst not strictly true, it's just so happened to be the go-to
language for anything that is needed for pulling statistics, graphs,
etc...

Whilst the body of work I do is part in Ruby thanks to our entire
infrastructure being managed by Puppet.  When it came to writing
programs and tools - ie: An interface to Ceph.  Python was just more
readily available than D, including on:
- Officially supported ceph interface.
- Boto for the S3 gateway interface.
- Pygal for zero-to-awesome on generating SVG graphs for usage analytics.
- More trust in python's json serialisation capabilities than D's std.json.


I could spend time writing new libraries and interfaces for what I
want to do, but at the end of the day, I found myself sticking to what
was already supported, in the language that just so happened to have
everything required already written.