Functional programmers and polyglot programming

[Michael Newton]

Hi all,

I'm having some discussions with my boss at the moment about the use of F#, and more generally the use of functional programming techniques. We are currently experimenting with it (and have some F# code in production), but his fear is that the recruitment pool is too small for it to be safe to expand our usage of these techniques across the company. He's especially concerned that hiring for F# will be too small a group of candidates, and that other functional programmers would be unwilling to swap from their language of choice - or would take too long to transfer their knowledge to F#.

I suspect that he is incorrect, but I've agreed with him that I will attempt to collect some evidence rather than just asking him to take my word for it!

If you have a moment, would you be able to answer some of the following questions:

* Do you know/have you used in anger more than one programming language?

* Would you be interested in Brighton based jobs with a functional programming component, even if the language used is not your primary functional language?

* Have you ever recruited a user of an other functional language? How long did it take them to become productive with your existing code base?

Thanks in advance for any replies, and hopefully this doesn't come across as too spammy! To make this slightly less theoretical, we are actually hiring - but it's not for a post that's especially functional. If you're a html front end developer who knows/is interested in Angular and wants to work on a website with a F# back end, do get in touch...

Thanks,

Michael Newton (@mavnn)

[Richard Dallaway]

Would this topic be a useful session for people at Functional Brighton?

It wouldn't surprise me if a majority of people were programming in multiple languages. Probably JavaScript + something else.

Regarding recruiting, the argument I've seen is that you want smart developers and smart developers want to use tools like F#. So going from C# to F#, for example, might turn out to be attractive for new hires.  Hiring from other functional languages is probably a very personal choice - your ad will find that self selecting group, I suspect!

Hope that's some use
Richard

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