The Choice of Programming Language

What considerations go into the right language for the job

When I was very young, I would spend school breaks with my grandparents in London. My granddad was quite the handyman. On one of these occasions, he asked me to help hand him tools as he was fixing some plumbing issue. Right off the bat I ran into problems as soon as he asked for a spanner. I looked at the big box of tools in front of me, looked back at my granddad, and gave him a hammer.

I was a Brooklyn kid going to American schools. That day I learned that a spanner in the UK is called a wrench in the US. My granddad made it a point to explain that the Americans had the language all wrong.

Now could my granddad have used a hammer. Probably, but it would have made a mess of the pipes. I still remember that look my granddad gave me when I insisted that he use the hammer. It was the look of “my dear poor daft grandson.”

There is a well known cognitive bias known as the Law of the Instrument*. The person most closely associated with this idea is Abraham Maslow, who wrote in 1966:

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

What is interesting is that while Abraham offers up the quote closest to what we attributed as the modern saying “Give a child a hammer and everything looks like a nail”, this…