>>> Training employees is expensive.  If you hire someone who has exactly
>>> what you're looking for, it saves you money.
>>
>> Well, sure.
>>
>> But remember, we're not talking about training somebody to be an expert
>> carpenter when they've never sawn a block of wood in their life. We're
>> talking about taking somebody who's an expert programmer and giving them
>> two to three weeks to learn a new programming language. If you're going
>> to employ somebody for 5+ years, then giving them a week or two to learn
>> a necessary skill is peanuts.
>
> It depends on the programmer.
>
> Some programmers only learn syntax - and in their language they do pretty
> well, but learning a new one is more difficult for them.

Well, sure. I've certainly met people who can throw together crappy Java 
code, but would be /totally lost/ if they had to actually *learn* a new 
programming language. Like, it would take months if not years of 
training for them to do that.

And then there are other programmers who already know a dozen languages 
and can easily learn a bit of new syntax for another one.

In summary, there are flexible programmers and inflexible ones. I would 
argue that the flexible ones are the "good" ones - the ones that will 
still be useful to you in the future if you decide to move your codebase 
to some other platform. But hey, it's your enterprise; you decide. :-P

(At least, that /would/ be my attitude if it weren't that *every* 
enterprise sees only the value of whether you can write the type of code 
they want /today/...)

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