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Am I the only one who thinks it's crazy that people would compete for jobs because of a language? Especially a new language? Would anyone seriously give up a job just for the opportunity to program in another language?

Perhaps this is a bigger thing among corporate programmers? I've only worked at smaller companies where they are more open to experimenting if you talk them into it.

3 comments

Many programmers have fairly strong preferences about programming languages and definitely many people would consider a Go job more desirable than a Java job. Most of those people aren't currently Java programmers - it's said[1] that Go is largely attracting people from dynamic languages and not from C++/Java.

[1] See this essay from Rob Pike where he says Go is attracting programmers mostly from dynamic languages (though he raises C++ programmers as the chief contrast, but still mentions Java too) : http://commandcenter.blogspot.fi/2012/06/less-is-exponential...

It's an interesting phenomenon indeed. Coming from C++ and Prolog, I disliked Java quite a bit, but took two positions where Java was the main language (because they were interesting NLP/ML positions). In the end it's a tool to get interesting work done.

I follow some PL lists and there seems to be a sizeable group of people who prefer a position in their favorite language. Of course, I don't know what portion of the overal market they represent.

I think it's the opposite. The corporate programmer might not care about Go vs Java. But in a smaller company, Go is going to be more desirable.