Hey Sammis,

before giving any technical advise, or seeking technical advise, I would always recommend to lay out the requirements as precisely as possible.

You state that

Let me put it this way: maybe. But this is most certainly not your real concern right now. Every choice you can make will inavitably have its downsides.

So the real questions are:

1. Why is money a problem? If you’re going to do business for 20-30 years you need to make millions yourself with this enterprise. So if money is a problem now, developing from scratch is maybe not a smart option.
   (That beeing said: economically it makes sense to keep costs down. Just remember that licensing costs will almost always be lower than development costs if you can get the same system. This is true for almost any part of the world)
2. What are you up to? Are you a startup? Are you a development department or agency for a company that wants to expand or change its business? Is this a public government sector type of thing, where paying people is not a problem because they are “there anyway”?
   2b) How many people will be working on the project.

Pointing to any particular technology is not doing any good, without answering at least question 2). Because it massively depends on what to optimize for.

That beeing said: if you are sure (and I mean absolutely, rock solid, super dooper, “I have seen the contract” sure) that this project will be very long running you need to optimize for one thing: changeability / refactoring. Don’t hardwire stuff, keep everything as separated as possible. Create clean APIs that stabilize fast and don’t change. Keep the scope of every part of the system as small and focused as humanly possible.

This advice is, I think, universal for large systems and does not depend on any particular technology. Just like: try to introduce as little side effects as possible and only in well defined and understood places.

So, if you can, please give us a little more info about your project

(Not that I don’t enjoy a good technology discussion but I think this isn’t helping OP as much )

I know you mention no off the shelf solutions, but everything you mentioned is way bigger than you’d likely need initially. I’ll point out https://www.shopify.com/pricing and https://www.bigcommerce.com/essentials/pricing/ as two things that don’t cost nearly as much and are likely cheaper than paying a team to build something equivalent.

From reading the requirements what jumps out at me if that it is required to last for 30 years, so I would think carefully about what technology is going to last that long.

The Java ecosystem has enough momentum for that, is currently very mature, and is not difficult to hire for, so I would be seriously Kotlin, Scala or Java.

I’ve not come across NuoDB before. It seems to be a niche proprietary database. Given proprietary databases have a habit of disappearing due to funding problems and niche databases have a problem of disappearing due to contributor shortages do you think it’ll be around in 10+ years? You may end up having to maintain an unfamiliar database by yourself, which is a scary idea. I would likely use Postgres or MySQL/MariaDB, both will still be around and supported for that long and both have been proven to usable at scale.

Developing an E-Commerce platform from scratch will be a massive amount of time, effort and money, saying this, I’ll let you know what I think:

I don’t like Go, just my personal opinion, but I think a big code base will be a pain to maintain. I may change my opinion when Go 2 came out, seems like it will improve a lot, but it’s not here yet.

I’ve never tried Scala, it may work for you and your company, just want to add that you may want to consider Kotlin too, it’s built by and for the enterprise.

COBOL? is that a thing? I don’t know, never tried it.

Elixir and Erlang are the only sane choices from the languages you mentioned. I think there are great stories of success from big enterprises where concurrency is a must, like WhatsApp, Discourse, Pinterest, and so on.

Also from all options you mentioned, I think Elixir is the only one that has a well-established web framework, and that is an advantage to speed up development. Go has a lot of frameworks available, none of them like Phoenix, complete solutions like Phoenix doesn’t have much value in the Go community, in fact some people think that is much better to build your own stack with a toolkit to have more flexibility, that means you’ll need to figure out the libraries required for the project if you follow that path. Kotlin has support for Spring a well-known framework in the enterprise’s world. I don’t know about Scala or COBOL.

Honestly for something maintainable over a huge period of time I’d opt for something stronger typed than elixir or go or so. Scala isn’t bad for that, better than kotlin, but for working with money and the detail you need with that then I’d not opt for it either. Something like COBOL actually isn’t bad for this, not that I’d start any new project in it, Idris would be perfect except it is more academic then ‘useful’, so I’d probably opt for Rust, it’s still very strongly typed (though not dependently typed, it is a mock-refined typing though, so better than normal HM type systems) and is very reliable and seems to have the staying power to stay those decades (it really is the first language I’ve seen that I think can replace C/C++).

Elixir, however, would be great for scalability, however you’d want a most excessive test suite, dialyzer types everywhere, and a lot of enforcement. Combining Elixir and Rust would be a fantastic mix though and they work together exceptionally well, so Elixir would save you time for the bulk coding and Rust would give you the numerical safety and speed.

Still, I’d opt for something pre-made, this kind of task is anything but trivial.