3 things you forgot about when adding a new language to your runtime environment.

Many engineers seek to use the right tool for the job (and they should). Most tech managers get a bit freaked out at the idea of endless language proliferation (who cares?). To help your tech managers be a little less freaked out and ensure you never ever again get stuck in a J2EE stack, there are 3 things that you need to keep in mind when adding Python, Ruby, Haskell or Lisp to your runtime environment.

1. The MySQL bindings will suck.
2. The initial appserver config will be wrong.
3. The exception handling and reporting will be useless.

We'll miss you too Duke.

The MySQL bindings will suck.

I'm 0 for 3 (Java, Ruby, Python) in implementing a new language and having anything sort of like smart idle connection timeout handling. I've needed to implement wrappers in Java (hopefully this isn't still the case), patch the Ruby MySQL gems and have tried to figure out the one right Python wrapper for ensuring my app doesn't need a restart once connections are timed out by the server. These are all solvable. Just make sure you test for these issues and resolve them prior to production deployment.

The initial appserver config will be wrong.

Most languages run in some sort of appserver, typically that's wsgi or some mod_ apache plug-in. But, some appservers have strong language preferences - esp. in the Java world. Make sure you understand how your new language is going to run in a new appserver - multithreaded or multiple processes? how many threads or processes do you need? are database connections pooled?

The exception handling and reporting will be useless.

On our team, at Knewton, we email all engineers exceptions and stack traces. We've needed to implement this for both Ruby and Python. For both, we needed to add in important information for debugging - request params, headers, along with a usable stack trace. One other common issue we've encountered is that all libraries for connecting to external resources (curl) have useless default errors. Most of these libraries do not tell you explicitly what they were trying to connect to when the exception has occurred - "Destination Unreachable" is not useful; which destination (hostname, ip, port)? We've patched curb in Ruby and are currently patching Python to let us know what we were unable to connect to.

These are the most common issues I've seen when adding a new language to an environment. Are there any I'm missing (or conveniently forgetting about)? If you can think of any, drop me a comment below.