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.

My project's playground is actually a bit smaller than that, since it has to run on the JVM. But that's still a pretty big playground, and trying out (or creating) new web frameworks is totally fair game for experimentation, even if you're in a relatively high-profile domain.

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. And anything that takes more than a week of effort requires a design document, with specific sections that have to be filled out, and with feedback from primary and secondary reviewers of your choice. The net result is that 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.

I've never seen anything like it before, to be honest. I don't think you can get that kind of software-engineering discipline without doing it right from the start, and creating a culture that enforces and reinforces that discipline as the organization grows.