Choosing The Right Tool For the Job

Choosing the right programming language or framework for a project can be key to the success of the project.

In today’s episode, Sean Allen Sean shares a story of picking the right tool for a job. The tool he ends up picking will surprise you.

His problem: make a distributed stream processing framework, something that can take a fire hose of events and perform customer’s specific calculations on them but the latency needs to be less than a millisecond and the calculations might be CPU intensive. Who would need something like this? The initial use case was risk systems for Wall Street banks. 

“Basically programming languages are tools. It's not about ergonomics, it's not about developer experience, it's not about all the things that we normally talk about, it's about getting the job right. For whatever that means it's a means to an end.” - Sean Allen

Episode Page

Episode Transcript

Links:

• Martin Thompson - Low Latency JVM
• Basho - Riak
• Haskell Quicksort
• Pony Talk
• Pony Lang