[Haskell-cafe] What happens if you get hit by a bus?

[Brian Hurt]

I think the "truck-factor" implications of the programming language as
dwarfed by the implications of everything else in the project.  Any project
of any significant size is going to have a huge amount of project-specific
information tucked up inside the programmers head.  It doesn't matter if
there are a million other programmers who know the language you used, or
only a dozen- if you're the only one who knows how things were done, and
more importantly, why they were done that way, and you get hit by a truck,
then your boss has a big problem.  Whether there are millions of candidate
replacement programmers, or only dozens, none of them had the
project-specific knowledge you had.  Finding a replacement who knows the
language is the least of his problems.

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Colin Adams <colinpauladams at gmail.com>wrote:

> I would think there were plenty of Haskell programmers ready to jump in as
> replacements.
>
> On 16 December 2011 15:37, Michael Litchard <michael at schmong.org> wrote:
>
>> I'm learning what it means to be a professional Haskell programmer,
>> and contemplating taking on side jobs. The path of least resistance
>> seems to be web applications, as that is what I do at work. I've been
>> investigating what some web developers have to say about their trade.
>> One article addresses the question above. His answer was that he uses
>> RoR which has a large community and he is therefore easily
>> replaceable. My question, for freelancers in general, and web
>> developers in particular is this: How do you address this question?  I
>> imagine potential clients would need to be assuaged of their fears
>> that hiring me would lead to a lock-in situation at best, and no one
>> to maintain a code base at worst. Lock-in won't be part of my business
>> model, also sooner or later we part ways with the client. When the
>> client wonders, "What happens then?", what is a good answer?
>>
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>
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