Simon Willison’s Weblog

Have you ever experienced a boost in productivity by switching to a different programming language?

19th March 2014

My answer to Have you ever experienced a boost in productivity by switching to a different programming language? on Quora

Switching from PHP to Python (over a decade ago now) dramatically improved my productivity as a programmer.

Posted 19th March 2014 at 6:38 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026
Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026
Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026

This is Have you ever experienced a boost in productivity by switching to a different programming language? by Simon Willison, posted on 19th March 2014.

productivity 32 programming 158 programming-languages 42 quora 1005

Next: We applied to Y Combinator a few weeks ago and submitted a demo. We made significant progress since then and have a much better demo now. Is it possible to replace the demo? Is it advisable?

Previous: How does one decide which Javascript framework (e.g. Node, Backbone, Angular) to use on any given project?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe