It’s very easy to teach a good developer a new language. We use Nim for embedded firmware development at my work, and have been expanding our team. It’s been simple: hire good C/C++ devs who are interested in learning something new but related, and teaching them. Takes about two weeks before they’re comfy, sometimes less (python experience seems to help a little due to some surface level syntactic similarities)
You are describing the honeymoon period of choosing a non mainstream approach.
In time, it starts to become clear that this non mainstream thing hasn't really picked up the steam to become mainstream. Your developers are starting to realise there are no jobs advertised for Nim, so this isn't good for their career. Then the Nim project starts to stagnate. But you've written so much code in it that it's hard to turn back. But the person who decided on the non-mainstream technology - if they are still there they are defending it to avoid losing face. if they have moved on and left you the problem then the new CTO is explaining to the CEO the bind the company is in. Time to start planning the budget for a complete rewrite in the language that is standard practice for the industry for this sort of thing.
At this point, C++ ain't looking so bad for this sort of project.
You are describing programming as if the language being used is the primary work skill and as if devs are somehow “trapped” by the language they happen to be paid to use at the time.
I live in a very different world and over the past 13 years have been paid to write Obj. C, Python, PHP, CSS, JS, Ruby, Elixir, Golang and a small amount of Rust. All are still useful skills that I’m likely to encounter again.
In a few cases, I used languages that later lost steam (Flash, CoffeeScript and Elm). It wasn’t a disaster, though. I just took what I’d learned and moved on.
Whereas not a single shop has gone down the road of picking some Javascript framework which stagnates or significantly changes over major versions and requires a lot time/money/effort to migrate.
The point of Nim is that we’re exercising all of their C and C++ skills as one of its venefits is being able to leverage existing drivers and modules for peripherals. Nim is C, at the end of the day.
I’m not some fresh faced 20 something, I’ve got nearly two decades in industry at this point, and I just frankly disagree with your assessment.
Where did the rest of the code come from, or who made the decision to start that way? They should at least be able to spearhead it. Obviously it's different for tiny organizations, but generally, if someone inexpertly made architectural decisions without building the institutional knowledge to continue without them, the language they chose will just be one of many big problems.
And those people shouldn't be in executive roles, even in smaller organizations. Being able to mentor people is a basic management skill and is why blindly making engineers into dev managers based on seniority is idiotic. If you have someone incapable of mentoring people unilaterally making those decisions without a counterpart that can, that's not a problem with the stack-- that's a problem with management that will manifest itself in countless other ways.
