Team Language Replication

You’ve decided to build a new product with a group of people. The product is going to fit into your current portfolio nicely and will get you to the next stage of your company.

You, as is every member of the engineering team, are assigned to do some preliminary research on the product. We would hate to take four months building the product and not have it work as expected.

You’ve read and built other new products for your company and so you know the first step to a successful product is interviewing the customers. You interview a bunch of customers and present the findings of these interviews back to your team.

Everyone is in agreement to the new product. Customers want it. Engineers can build it. Marketers can market it. Sales can sell it.

Now, we need to build it. We know we want it fast and we know that the language our company is most experienced with is a higher level language like Ruby or Python. However, this requires some hard languages. This requires C/C++.

This is the question. What programming language do you build the new product in?

Opt for the Familiar Language

I’m assuming that you like your current engineering team. If you don’t, get rid of them and get new people. But, let’s say you are currently happy with them, they are driven, and they are smart.

I argue that although you want it to work fast, hence the C++ requirement, you should use the language that your current team is most familiar with.

Using a language the team knows is similar to replicating data across multiple systems. You don’t want a single person to be the only developer who can work on the new system. The whole team should be able to do it. Otherwise, why are you even a team?

A product is not a one-man show. It is a team effort.

Always use languages your team knows well. When building future components make sure your team has spent the time researching and identifying problems in those new technologies. You don’t want to build something, start using it, and realize it shouldn’t have been built on a technology that doesn’t do what you need it to do.