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.
After having not read about PERL in ages. I hit two articles about them. IF I had a nickel for every time this happened. I’d have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice right?
but in all seriousness. I think nothing kills engineering departments more than a forced march port and rewrite. Much better to follow strangler fig pattern and deliver value along the way. It takes perseverance but it’ll work.
Quote Citation: Steve Francia, “Why engineers can’t be rational about programming languages | spf13”, 3 Nov 2025, https://spf13.com/p/the-hidden-conversation/