Beating the Competition

The writer of the article has interesting points about his experience in beating the competition in developing software. Now for the reader it may be easy to take the stand of choose a uncommon language and you should beat the competition. This is what the writer seems to imply but is not always the case. For example there are two new languages that seem to be quite optimized and a lot of programmers love for that same reason: RUST and GO . Now someone who read the article and heard about any of these two languages its first instinct may be try to create their own service using that language. These may sound like idea at the moment but it really isn't from my perspective. Especially if you are going to create a web service.These two languages are relatively new and won't have a whole framework as Java does to create a web application like Apache or Spark. Therefore you will waste time trying to create your own framework.It may give you advantage cause you are the only one that will have that framework, and you may sell in the future.This is where my second point comes. Your users won't notice the difference between Java or Rust. This is a big advantage of how fast the hardware is becoming. That technically implementing Rust for Web Applications may be an overkill. The users would only care about your Front End and how responsive and pretty it looks. Cutting down 1ms to your process won't be that noticeable to any user or even you as a programmer. 

Now you may think I am trying to say the author of the article doesn't know what he is talking about. Not necessarily, he has two main points that we should know and any developer should keep in mind. First, always try to innovate on how are you going to provide a service. In his case he wanted to provide a service through the web, something it was extremely rare at his time. This gave him a complete new advantage over any competition. Second developing fast, This is where the language comes in, LISP help him to program new stuff really fast without any problems. This was his advantage over the new competitors! LISP being extremely functional was an extra, but being able to create new features was what kept him alive in the market. 

Rust and Go won't die anytime soon and I am not saying you shouldn't give it sometime to learn any of these Languages. In matter of fact you should! Learning the potential of such a powerful language can give you an idea on what you can use it for in the future. This could eventually give you and advantage over your competitors. There are new technologies coming out each day,Machine Learning, Dataming, AI. That will require all the computational power you can have and in those cases RUST and GO could be the solution.