A very bad metaphor. You shouldn't build a project for a company, using a certain programming language, just because you like that programming language. It's your responsibility to look for and provide the best possible solution to the client and that must involve picking the best programming language for the job. Of course there can be exceptions when a tool/library/framework is already being used.
Oh? Could I subjectivly suggest that Javascript would be appropriate for a system with hard real time requirements or formal verification requirements?
Sometimes using a band saw to conduct brain surgery is just completely wrong.
It's pretty clear that COBOL would be a bad choice to write a multiplayer online game, and that JavaScript would be a bad choice for an operating system.
As for the far far more common scenario (the one I had in mind) of choosing whether one of Ruby, Python or Node.js might be better for a certain project, the choice between the three is often going to be fairly subjective. You could solve a lot of problems in all three quite well. Trying to decide which one is objectively the "best" is often a waste of time that could be spent actually solving the problem at hand.
A fairly useless one at that. It plays on the idea that people don't consider technical merit when choosing programming languages and the metaphor did nothing but trivialize the idea of objectively comparing languages and their strong/weak points.
I agree that the metaphor was partially useless (perhaps poorly worded) - but it's not much better to think that the issue of choosing programming languages is purely objective. You could spend a very long time arguing whether Ruby or Python was better for a particular task, when the important thing is either of them will do a relatively good job for the task at hand and be a better choice than COBOL.
The fact that two or more programming languages are particularly suited for a certain task has absolutely no bearing on the general usefulness of having conversations about what languages are good for. It has absolutely no relevance to state that; the discussion didn't become more or less valid by that assertion.
Discussions that are prolonged like that become long because people are not actually being _objective enough_.
If you had an objective discussion about Python and Ruby you would conclude that yes, both of these languages have very broad ecosystems and are particularly suited for scripting (and glue work). Python is better suited for scientific computing, etc.
Nothing about the scenario you speculate about invalidates good discussion about programming languages and I don't know what about the scenario makes you think it does.
> Nothing about the scenario you speculate about invalidates good discussion about programming languages and I don't know what about the scenario makes you think it does.
I agree - nothing invalidates good discussion on this topic. My point is that trying to decide the best programming language for a particular task (or trying to decide why one programming language is ill-suited) isn't something that always needs a perfectly objective answer.
> My point is that trying to decide the best programming language for a particular task (or trying to decide why one programming language is ill-suited) isn't something that always needs a perfectly objective answer.
Ok, I hear that. I agree that you have to find a local maximum to settle at in these things. It's about being reasonable and pragmatic, after all.
