FWIW, two points- Paul Graham, among others, has talked about issues like this. See for instance (about Python):
http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html The argument about using new technologies in the startup context is generally that smarter people want to work with better tools at higher levels of abstraction. Those people are naturally harder to find, but a way to attract them is to use tools that can give very skilled people more leverage. Relatedly, being concerned about supporting the technology with commodity skills is something for the future owners of your startup to care about, not you. That said, delivery risk with new technologies is *always* a concern. So the other point is- sometimes you can address concerns about "risky" choices obliquely by raising *your own* concerns about those choices, to redirect the conversation to areas that make sense to you. This indicates that *you're* thinking about what they're thinking about, and maybe you have a different take on what the risks are- but that you're thinking about it means you're going to takes steps to mitigate the risks and keep the channels of communication open. My main concern about using Clojure wouldn't have to do with people or performance or academic/business focus, it would just have to do with maturity, not so much of the language, more at the level of application patterns. To that end, were I starting a project, I'd look for skilled Java people with some Lisp, and approach Clojure not as a Lisp, but as a better Spring, and use the patterns from Spring to minimize delivery risk. Focus mostly on creating performance sensitive stateless components + interfaces in Java, using non-bean generic data structures, and do the configuration wiring/lifecycle/dataflow stuff in Clojure. More work, but safer ramp-up. Then I'd go deeper into Lispifying a subsystem. $0.02. On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 1:59 AM, Baishampayan Ghose<b.gh...@ocricket.com> wrote: > Hello, > > So I have been a Common Lisp user for quite sometime and at my earlier > work we managed to build a state-of-the-art Travel portal in CL with a > very small team of CL programmers. > > This was all fine except one thing. The management never really believed > in Lisp and they eventually replaced the whole Lisp team with 3x Java > programmers and are now rewriting the perfectly fine system in Java. > > That was my earlier job. > > Now I am at the moment doing a startup and I was thinking of using > Clojure because it has the best of both the worlds. It can use Java > libs, is a Lisp and is heavily geared towards concurrent programming; > making it one of the most modern and pragmatic programming languages at > the moment. > > This decision was based purely on the merit of Clojure and not because I > just wanted to do some Lisp programming. I seriously believe that > Clojure can really help us in building the kind of concurrent > application we want to build. > > But then, there is another problem. The advisors of the current startup > (who were techies in their time, but now are highly successful people in > the Silicon Valley) reacted strongly to the word "Lisp" (it apparently > brought back old memories of their AI class in college) and are not > "convinced enough" about Clojure. > > I tried explaining that Clojure runs on the JVM and thus won't have any > problem with libs or integrating with existing Java apps but they are > not happy. > > Their concerns are thus: > > 1. How do you get Clojure programmers? Lisp is not for the faint hearted. > > 2. What about the performance of Clojure? Is it fast? > > 3. People who want to use this are more academically inclined and are > not practical. This will make the whole project fail. > > I need some pointers on this. This is a really crucial thing for me and > any help will be appreciated. > > Regards, > BG > > -- > Baishampayan Ghose <b.gh...@ocricket.com> > oCricket.com > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
