🔗 Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages

A programming language is the single most expensive choice a company makes, yet we treat it like a technical debate. After watching this mistake bankrupt dozens of companies and hurt hundreds more, I’ve learned the uncomfortable truth: these decisions are rarely about technology. They’re about identity, emotion, and ego, and they’re destroying your velocity and budget in ways you can’t see until it’s too late.

Early in my career, I worked at Takkle, a promising social network. A sudden departure vaulted me from lead engineer to VP of Engineering, leading a team of 12. While we were delivering on all our goals, I was in my early 20s and lacked experience, a risk our board wanted to fix. They pressured our CEO to recruit a CTO with more experience. I looked forward to learning from him; he was a well known figure in the Perl community and arrived with a stack of O’Reilly “camel” books.

One of his first acts was to pronounce our language, PHP, the wrong choice. He decreed a switch to Perl. This decree happened after what felt to me like a sham analysis comparing PHP and Perl.

Our velocity collapsed. Our team had to not only learn a new language but rebuild from scratch, delaying our product by nine months. Our monthly burn rate jumped from $200K to $500K as we more than doubled our size to make up for the lost velocity while building the new Perl based system, which halved our runway.

Our CTO did deliver, at least on some of his promises. We built a beautiful system, one I was truly proud of. But it was too late. By the time we finally launched, the market opportunity had vanished. Facebook had now expanded beyond colleges, and we were at the end of our monitary runway. The increased spend had shortened our runway by half, and we didn’t have enough momentum with the new site to reach the milestones required to raise more money.

I’ve often wondered: What if we had just stuck with PHP? We had a fine system and real momentum. We would have launched much earlier at a fraction of the cost. PHP was good enough for Facebook; why not us?

But the question that haunted me was: Why did such an experienced leader make such an terrible mistake?

Promises Made

• Switching to Perl would unlock the architecture we needed
• Rebuilding from scratch would accelerate hiring and quality

Reality Delivered

• Velocity collapsed as the team relearned and rebuilt everything
• Burn rate jumped from $200K to $500K per month