[racket] Racket in Industry Apologia (was Re: Racket Apology)

On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 1:45 PM, Brian Mastenbrook <brian at mastenbrook.net> wrote:
> I feel compelled to point out that there's a big difference between
> "industry" as a whole and "business that's looking for a stable language
> with a broad supply of programmers". Just as most businesses aren't the big
> corporations everyone likes to rant about, not all (and maybe even not
> most?) tech companies aren't big companies where it's acceptable to throw
> warm bodies with a passable knowledge of Java or Python at a problem.

Funny thing about instability of the runtime... we did a Java project
for an insurance company who had sunk 7 figures into their server to
bring it up to date so it could run Java, and quickly. Keep in mind
here, Java is "enterprise" and "standard" and all of the other things
people are listing. Using a vanilla web development stack, we quickly
ran into issues, and found the problem to be a bug in their
implementation of the JVM. Despite hundreds of thousands sunk into
software licensing, 7 figures sunk into the machine itself... their
response? "You are going to have to work around that.". Which we did,
and, life goes on.

>From what I can see you always run into issues with software, so, why
not use the best stuff possible?

Then again, you never get fired for choosing...