I’ve been part of many projects where choice of language, frameworks and libraries were imposed by the client strictly. This became so natural that even for my own projects I used to look at designing them around single language (ie. Python). Usually JavaScript creeps here and there as well regardless it seems these days of what you are developing: web app (obviously!), data base views (think: CouchDB), game (Unity3D), desktop apps (Titanium/others?).
Time shows that the saying “if the only tool that you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail” is absolutely correct. In every system design the right tools should be used for the job. This is obvious! – you may think. Sure, but how often did you end up anyway thinking in categories of single language?
To be really flexible think of mixing and matching different languages for your projects.
Node.js is maturing and becoming serious contender when it comes to writing web apps. Throwing Objective-J to the mix may give you huge productivity boost. Using Python on the backend to utilize its great amount of libraries to glue your app with whatever you may want or wish for or to handle some more advanced logic. And Erlang for the parts of your system that need concurrency and its async nature (ie. for streaming). There’s four languages right there! And who is not to say that you’ll want to boost some performance with C or C++ modules for Python, Erlang or Node.js in the above scenario.
Unfortunately not every project owner will give you such freedom. But it’s your task, as a software architect/lead programmer/etc to rationalize use of every and each tool at your disposal.
Time is most precious asset in every project – using right tools for the job means better productivity so delivery faster.
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