On Mar 11, 2014, at 2:09 PM, Jarrod Swart <jcsw...@gmail.com> wrote: > My goal is to convince the CEO and other early stage executives of the > benefits of using Clojure in place of PHP. All the early founders have > worked in places that use PHP, and I have worked as a PHP developer with some > of them at other companies. For the past year I have used Clojure in my > personal projects and am comfortable with the language.
I'll play devil's advocate here (as someone who's gone up in front of those lovely VC folks when trying to get a startup off the ground)... What are you building? Why do _you_ think Clojure is a better choice than PHP? > * What is the talent pool like (for Clojure) and can we outsource less > important tasks to other developers. The talent pool for Clojure is much smaller than the talent pool for PHP. On the plus side, I'd expect competent Clojure developers to be, on average, much better developers than "competent" PHP developers. Outsourcing may be much harder and/or much more expensive for Clojure than PHP. > * What advantages does this technology offer over something like PHP (from a > business perspective)? The scalability of the JVM and the huge ecosystem of Java and JVM languages and libraries. But PHP developers will likely be much cheaper and just as plentiful (as Java/JVM developers - and far more plentiful than Clojure developers). And unless you happen to hit it enormously big, scalability may not be a real problem for you (and Facebook is a poster child for scalable PHP even tho' they've done a lot of weird stuff to get it there). If you're building an extensive web site / web application, PHP has much more maturity in that area and has well-established frameworks and content management systems, and a huge pool of (average to cheap) talent available. If I was your CEO or another early stage executive, I'd be pretty skeptical of using something as left field as Clojure for web development. If your core business is big data or AI or something else that relies on complex data / structure analysis, I'd be more sympathetic. Or if most of the core early team were already experienced with Clojure. But in the early stage, you'll need to move fast, pivot early and often, and be prepared to throw away a lot of demo / prototype code so picking something you're all comfortable with might well be a better business choice than some cool tech you might all like to use. Sean Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ "Perfection is the enemy of the good." -- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880)
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