You have to tell the government or some auditing group what you are using and how, but they don’t say, “Don’t use Haskell” or “Don’t use Scala”. And Scala isn’t a good example because Scala compiles to bytecode. So if you are using Javac/Java lang, you can just as easily use Scala.

I wouldn’t mind getting back into defense contracting to see if I could push “other” languages and what the restrictions but I imagine it is similar to what the SEC recommends.

There’s one thing though for using an inferior language: other people. They will have to work with it; so, I believe, one may well be a step ahead, but not 10 steps ahead. Or else we lose.

Plus on multisite projects, some development sites deploy new PC images on the begining of each project with the set of allowed tools. Afterwards the developers are frowned upon what they can install.

You have a good point regarding maintaining code. I have used other products in the past (Forte 4GL comes to mind), where I had to train my whole team on a entire suite of products. These people were fresh out of college, and had been trained on Windows systems. For them to provide on-call support with me, they needed to learn ssh, going through a terminal server, vi, bash, csh, and a language they had never heard of. One of my people couldn’t cut it, and he was let go. This wasn’t “can you handle language X”. It was “can you handle X, Y, Z, A, B, C, extra hours every other week, don’t get drunk while you’re on call” and more. I’m proud that they could step up to the plate, and I know they are better developers because of it. One of them was good enough that I turned management of that system over to him so I could transition to another team.

First of all, my boss in my 9-5 job is not a “false” authority. Yes, I might be able to just use what I want and get away with it despite being told not to, or maybe he’ll say “You got that done fast, but you’ve shown a clear inability to be a team player and that won’t work here. Goodbye.” Some people can lose their job and be fine, others can’t, and “suck it up princess” is a horribly callous thing to say without at least acknowledging that division.

Second, even if your boss lets you write what you want, what’s the deployment plan? Can you write Scala code and manage to get it running on an XBox? Will the Systems team (assuming there is one) be able to deploy your Rails app into their JVM stack? How much of their time will you waste with your decision? Yes, you could argue that these questions fall into the original question of what is the best language, but honestly you seem to ignore outside parties based on the tone of your post.

In short, sometimes “suck it up” actually means “use what’s known, not what’s fun”. Standardization sucks, but being pragmatic trumps being idealistic.