I understand that you are saying that sharper knives are harder to use on larger teams. That isn’t what I’m saying, I was only saying that most people think along those lines.

My experience is that when people say “larger teams” they never mean more peopel with the same level of skill as the smaller team.

This drives the dullness of the knives, and they are left with less skilled people using duller knives, and trying to make up for that with “volume.”

And you know what? Some people believe that they can become the Walmart of development and somehow have the magical logistics to make this work.

Perhaps they can. But it is very difficult to manage large-scale logistics, and it is very difficult to obtain good results from large teams.

I would say that there are far more people who believe it can be done than there are managers qualified to do it.

I am a lazy guy. I have obtained very good results with smaller teams of very good people. So I don’t throw all that experience in the garbage and chase the promised land of equal results with bigger teams with merely okay people.

Instead, I spend my time looking for ways to make smaller teams of good people even better.

That’s just my way.

I completely agree. What I was trying to say is that sharper knives are harder to use on larger teams, and not all problems are solvable by one misanthropic genius and a good LISP implementation (heresy!).

People often talk about how well certain languages “scale.” While they think they mean “scale to larger problems” what they often really mean is “scale to larger teams.”

Many people think of the two as equivalent, because how would you solve a large problem with a small team?

The answer, according to the expert chef, is to use sharper knives.

I’ve made a rather important change to the essay. I hope you like the new version even more.

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/10/if-sneetches-with-stars-use-java-and.html

On the contrary, the scripting language is a very sharp knife, while a rigid language like Java is a set of knives from sharp to plain dull. This can be very beneficial when you don’t know who else will be using the cutting boards at work