Language hopping

These past couple of weeks I’ve been hopping from one language to the next again. Trying to find that sweet spot for the stuff I do the most. Which is basically shuffle files around, automate some small tasks and do some web related things. I dove into Haskell again (against my better judgement), OCaml, F#, tried to do some Smalltalk again, Ada, D, Julia, Racket,.. All of these have their niches and their awesome features. All of them have things I don’t like. (I must exclude Smalltalk here because I just don’t know it well enough yet.)

All of this searching was ultimately to find the best tool to solve the problem I had. I want to make a small webbased game and I need a backend language for the logic. At some point I got frustrated and just started building in Go to have something to work with and see if some ideas of mine could actually be done. I’ve been using Go at work a lot and it was the fastest thing to get started with.

So now I’m building this in Go. Is it the best language out there? Heck no, but it’s Good Enough(tm) and gets the job done. Does the tool actually matter that much? Yeah, I’ll run into things I don’t like about it, for sure. But I’m convinced that it’s better to produce something than to keep looking for the best tool to do it with. Some people write all their stuff in JS. ‘Nuff said. There’s no shame if the end-product is what you wanted. Is there? (Maybe I should write a longer blog post about languages and hopping between them in general.)

Flame me in the comments!