I haven’t yet had the opportunity to work with Ruby, but my [admittedly limited] understanding is that it’s somewhat similar to Java. But you do bring up a good point about the popularity of a language not being the only measure of how fast one can pick it up.

If you think your team can ramp up to Ruby that quickly, consider that future projects won’t include the learning time and would be faster still. Speed obviously isn’t the only important measure, but it’s definitely something to consider.

On the matter of attracting great developers, I agree that language has an effect. Something I just thought of is that keeping your products in a legacy programming language will eventually cause maintenance costs to increase. In our case, moving to ASP.NET will allow us to find new developers with a little more ease.

Interesting post as it’s something that every new software project must consider. I agree that the key is to hire versatile developers instead of programmers. Versatile developers won’t have a problem picking up a new/niche language.

Well known languages/frameworks don’t always offer the fastest time to market. For instance, my team knows Java very well but doesn’t know Ruby or Rails. But because we have some very good developers my gut feeling is we’d be able to launch a product with RoR faster (or maybe just as fast) than if we launched another Java based webapp. With versatile devs you should be able to get the best of both worlds - fast time to market and maintainable code.

A colleague of mine suggested that the way to attract great developers is to build your app with technologies that appeal to them. Basically the applicants self-select based on your tech choices.

This might not be very practical for a number of reasons. As a secondary option he suggested simply looking for certain technologies on applicant resumes, even if you’re not planning on using those technologies. In any case, finding good developers is hard.

Thanks for the post.

-David