Recently, I’ve been meeting various people in the industry for different reasons. Most of the time, I had a simple question for them:
Why did you select this particular language?
Most of the time they would reply with, ‘It was decided before I joined or we switched in some time back’ those are the most common answers I got. The second answer makes sense to me. A lot of people switched from PHP or Java with the boom of microservice concept or performance issues. I know this industry evolves every day. Even the infrastructure is also evolving every day. We had a time when we just copied and pasted code folders into the server and released changes. Now we have something called CI/CD pipeline to do all of those things.
With better infrastructure, do we have to consider the language we write code in?
It depends. If you are considering building AI models, your go-to language would be Python. If you are building something else, you have a huge number of variations to choose from. You must select it based on your requirements.
But sometimes it was selected based on a number of factors inside the organization. Sometimes it comes down to language that employers are comfortable with. If there is a chance for research and time, people will come up with better solutions based on requirements and scalability.
Why did we select it?
People end up with those questions all the time. Architectural decisions can be changed easily in some cases, but when it comes down to programming, it is not that easy. Even the founder of Node.js built something new for mistakes he made. You can read about it in Deno documentation.
With the fast-paced world in the IT industry, I feel that we can achieve most of the existing applications through one programming language instead of using various things. However, it is not always the right answer. Every new version comes with performance enhancements and rich features that the community always asks for.
Verdict
It seems like you can’t find the right answer for why we selected it. It always ends up with a conversation of pros and cons, but what matters is: does it do the job as expected? If yes, then forget it. If it doesn’t meet people’s expectations, then we need to rethink for a better solution or make improvements. But if you start something new, you can either stick with the trend or think ahead.