Is there any common wisdom for managing a software project in an unfamiliar programming language?
Most software projects go for safety and use some mainstream language
but some opt for a niche programming language for special purposes, especially research projects.
Some literature I’ve found on this:
https://leaddev.com/culture-engagement-motivation/supporting-your-team-face-technical-unknowns
and
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1425168
2
The same measures must be taken, as for any new technology.
Especially you want to establish a full pipeline to start with a build of a skeleton application with largely dummy features.
Then make prototypes, unit tests, for every feature. Like e-mail, PDF generation, and so on. When e-mail is not provided as a library you’ll need some effort. E-mail must deal with Unicode in title and content. Here starts TDD, Test Driven Development.
You might opt for Feature Driven Development, where “feature” means a business feature, a system component. An inventory of features, business logic/rules is important.
A new language also means knowledge transfer, code snippets, code style that needs more enforcement, library examples. Code style checkers, like Lint, Sonar, might be rare, enforcing the need for unit tests and quite clean code. Testing performance, speed and needed resources is important. Profiling can also be done language agnostically.
It might be important to have at least peer reviewing on commit to version control.
You might want a staging with 24/7 observation (like java Melody), logging of system resources like memory, response times, problems.