ChrisDevBox

I know, is not an easy thing, just don’t go with your gut feeling, make a solid assessment based your own experience, market, location and type of project (Just to keep it simple).

Most programmers will lean towards their favorite programming language and will give you a biased opinion. Some are more objective and willing to see beyond their comfort zone.

If you are in a position of leadership you need to be able to make that decision without too much hesitation.

Things you need to consider:

1. Experience: Although your decision should not be made based on your strongest programming language experience does play a big part. 
2. Market: What programming language has the most resources out there (Code samples, forums, etc). You can test by doing a quick search with simple terms like “Threads C#” or “Database PHP” using Google.
3. Location: What is the predominant programming language in your area? You can find out by doing a quick local search on popular career search engines like monster.com or careerbuilder.com.  This is important when you need to staff up. 
4. Type: This is probably the most important one. You need to pick the right language for the right type of project. Let’s say you wanted to build a new wiki site. The logical thing to do is to use mediawiki (PHP) instead of writing a wiki from scratch using C# or Java.

I’m trying to keep it simple, there are other criteria you need to consider, but these are the most important I believe. Please send me comments if you feel I’m missing anything.

Here is a quick Google trends report on language popularity.  Dont’ use this to base your decision though!

If you need help picking a programming a language post a comment.  I’ll try to help.

Also, you can never go wrong with C#, PHP or Java.  Some people may argue that PHP or C# are not high performance. 

PHP has a few really good case studies such as Digg.com, Facebook.com and Chickipedia.com.  C# has microsoft.com and of course BREAK.COM! 

These are sites sustaining huge amounts of traffic, but they execute really fast because of the way they were built and scaled.

The key is knowing how to scale! The challenge is finding good architects and programmers, which I’ll cover on a different article.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 5:19 pm and is filed under .NET, How to, Microsoft, PHP, Uncategorized.