Choosing Languages

The column that took Steve at least ten dead drafts to write, by his own opening confession — he blames a subscription to Dave Barry for making every attempt seem worth burning. The abandoned plan was a whirlwind tour of the thirty-odd languages then in use at Amazon, which survives here only as a couple of borrowed C++ one-liners. What shipped instead is self-defense: a public method for studying forty languages part-time without being taken for a zealot about any of them, complete with a staged cross-examination by a "fictitious" colleague that Steve does not exactly win.

It ages in entertaining ways. The cost argument leans on Steve's stated plan to be at Amazon "a good long while" — the author's note above records how long that turned out to be. His skepticism that dynamic languages can carry big production systems closes with "I hope someday someone proves me wrong," a door his later essays keep walking back through. And the period furniture rewards a slow read: angry colleagues are told more than once to skip the email and publish their rebuttal as a blog, and Paul Graham turns up in the further-reading list as a writer just then becoming an industry thought leader. In 2005, both of those were tips rather than truisms.