Re: work times & accommodation @tokyo, WAS: Re: [tlug] Embedded linux dev wanting to find work in Tokyo.. Seeking advice.

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-07-24 16:26 +0900 (Thu), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Curt Sampson writes:

>  > It appears to be a matter of people's comfort level with change.
> 
> Well, that's a resource cost.  If, as a manager, you consistently
> ignore people's comfort levels....

I think you're talking about quite different situations from the ones
I'm talking about. The situations I've seen have managers that don't
appear to care particularly about employee's comfort levels, and they're
not implementing this better stuff because the *managers* are not
comfortable with it, not the employees.

The world is much closer to Dilbert than your representation of managers
making the best possible decisions that they can for their companyies
and employees.

> Also, we weren't talking about general change.

I think we were, back a ways in this thread.

> This means that not only do you have to make your own people happy
> with the change, you also need to get your clients and suppliers and
> complementers on board.

Yup. Which is exactly why you should be starting off on this kind of
thing early, rather than doing nothing about it until you've fallen
behind the rest of the industry.

> BTW, one of the reasons why Google sticks to those languages, I'm
> told, is that they work very well together.  It's relatively easy to
> port from Python to Java to C++, or to write portions of your Python
> programs in C++, as you need more performance.

Sure. But then again, speaking of Haskell (since I happen to be
particularly familiar with it), it produces standard binaries just like
C++ does, has more or less equivalant performance, is better than Python
at interfacing with C when you have to (which you generally don't need
to do for performance reasons), and is at least as compact and quick to
code in as Python. This stuff is out there, and if you happen to decide
that your future is a language without a good compiler and run-time
system currently, you can also dedicate a hacker or two to it.

Heck, MS, who you'd think would not be nearly as technologically
advanced as Google, not only has squirrelled away in one of their
research labs a couple of very, very smart researchers/hackers dedicated
to Haskell and GHC (the most advanced of the Haskell compilers) full
time, but has gone so far as to start building OCaml into .NET in the
guise of F#. I don't see much like this coming out of Google.

> Yeah, but how do well do they support swapping in a Ruby ROM for a
> long-time Python programmer?

ROM? At any rate, a programmer experienced with Python who's reasonably
smart ought to have no trouble picking up Ruby fairly quickly. I can't
see any reason to bother, since if you already have a full Python
infrastructure in place and people experienced with Python to go with
it, you might as well move your Ruby guys to Python. Neither language
offers enough over the other to make it worth changing from one to the
other, as far as I can see.

Note I say not "Python programmer" but "programmer experienced with
Python"; I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there who can kind
of hack stuff out with Python and will never be able to use another
language, but I gather that those aren't really the sort of people
Google is hiring. Keep in mind at all times here, I'm talking about a
company that has the cream of the crop of programmers.

> Do you propose that each new Haskell programmer who knows little about
> Java spend at least half her time porting old Java programs just
> so that when maintenance is actually needed, she'll already have a
> program written in a language she understands?

This is a thoroughly ridiculous scenario. Consider the following:

    1. If you're moving away from Java, yes, you want to start porting
    any programs that require heavy maintenance and modification to
    your new preferrred systems.

    2. Google has massive reserves of Java talent; anybody who doesn't
    can find a decent programmer who knows Java reasonably well quite
    easily.

    3. It would be pretty darn unusual for someone who knows Haskell not
    to have a reasonably decent understanding of Java, or be able to
    pick it up quite quickly.

>  > As for languages themselves, there is ample evidence that some are more
>  > powerful than others, and every language Google is using has come under
>  > pretty heavy criticism for various things. Are you really going to argue
>  > that, given the choices of any languages at all in the world, and a
>  > group of very, very smart programmers, C++, Java and Python would be the
>  > most powerful (or nearly so) set of languages to use? I don't think that
>  > even many Google staff would argue that.
> 
> Well, feel free to set up your straw man.  Which set of languages
> would you choose?

C++, Java, Ruby and Haskell, since I have reasonable knowledge of all of
those.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com