[erlang-questions] OT: Programming Language Selection as a Business Strategy

[jm]

Thomas Lindgren wrote:
> There are some papers on related issues: Gabriel's
> Worse is Better (and variations) and Paul Graham's
> Beating the Averages. As far as I can tell, the
> arguments employed are usually "common sense" rather
> than quantified. Part of it would seem to be the same
> decision as buying some other product to use (a
> long-lived piece of machinery, say) or deciding to
> follow a standard of some sort. Non-linguistic
> considerations will then be important.

I've read Graham's essay before and I'll obviously have to dig it up
again. I haven't heard of Gabriel's so I'm trying to find that as I
write this.

> When choosing between a standard and the alternative,
> this points to being conservative and following the
> herd, but of course one also has to consider the value
> added (or competitive advantage gained) by using the
> alternative, non-standard language. How to determine
> this? The state of the art here seems quite modest
> today, but maybe digging through the project
> calculation lit could suggest some useful analogous
> decisions.
> 
> If I were to attack the problem from scratch, I would
> probably model it with "real options".
I hadn't thought of the application of real options to the area, having
only a passing knowledge of it, although I did see it applied to a
related area in paple link off LtU.

We may see more on this in the future. I'm just suprised at the lack of
academic research given all the noise in some circles. May be well see
some one do a PhD thesis on it or something. Although, I think that the
people interested in this question from the computer science side are
more interested in the language itself, and the people from the business
studies side are more interest in management research and may consider
computer language matters to low level for consideration using what ever
language everone else happens to be using not realising the flow on
effects of such a choice. As such real options would be an idea tool for
uncovering the effects such a choice has.

Jeff.