http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rhino-on-rails.html

There's a nice post by Steve Yegge which explains some interesting facts about how the development teams at Google work internally and what programming languages are permitted (C++, Java, Python and Javascript) and why.

I specially like this part: "(...)for any significant piece of code at Google, you can find almost a whole book about it internally, and a well-written one at that".

Don't know if it says something that it's not already known but it's interesting anyway.

I'm guessing aquisitions are exempt from that rule. It would be a considerable waste of time for each Google acquisition to have to rewrite its entire product in a different language.

Interesting stuff.

<<One of the (hundreds of) cool things about working for Google is that they let teams experiment, as long as it's done within certain broad and well-defined boundaries. One of the fences in this big playground is your choice of programming language. You have to play inside the fence defined by C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript. (...)

Another boundary we have to play within is software engineering, including unit testing, documentation, code refactoring, security, scalability, internationalization, and a host of other non-negotiable criteria.

I hope you're beginning to see, at least faintly, why I love working at Google. It's because the code base is *clean*. >>

(He was allowed to use JavaScript on the server-side, not the client-side, though...)

cool!
btw, google's headhunters are hiring people from my school! ;-)

Tell us more Stefan ... :)

I found that: http://www.flickr.com/photos/polvero/tags/computerlanguages/
really interresting :)