Comment by galangalalgol
3 years ago
If you know algorithmically what will work sure, but if you don't, and you need to throw multiple approaches at a problem until one sticks, then a prototyping language is extremely helpful. The problem comes when management notices the prototype mostly works, they want you to ship it rather than make something sane now that you know which direction to head. I find using matlab is useful for this. Managers seem to understand that you don't ship matlab, where if I used numpy or julia...
This is interesting. It strikes me that if you think that you know a better language for writing a program than whatever your organization uses that there is nothing stopping you from writing your prototypes in that language and then porting them back to whatever the org uses when you're done. This is similar to the technique of writing a grammar with a parser generator and when you're happy with it writing a custom parser by hand.