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I've gone one step further and created a template: Some companies are succeeding in spite of [insert language]. There are many, many users of [insert language]
by jamroom 10y ago
I've gone one step further and created a template:
Some companies are succeeding in spite of [insert language]. There are many, many users of [insert language], and we'd expect that there would be considerable variance, with some users doing awful (no traction, buggy sites, etc) and some hitting home runs (facebook). Because it's such a popular language, it will have users across this entire spectrum.
It's easy to cherry-pick the winners and miss all of the tremendous losers who picked [insert language] and got nothing for it.
- chc 10y agoYour template is far less interesting than the original statement. PHP spent a pretty long time as basically the lingua franca outside the enterprise world (and even some places in it), and there are still domains where it holds that title (e.g. WordPress alone outweighs many languages' ecosystems), so the phenomenon the parent was describing applies more to PHP than to some arbitrary language you could insert into this template.
- jamroom 10y agoI actually agree with the original statement. PHP, for quite a few years now certainly has NOT been the language of choice for most startups, yet we still see the majority of them fail. "and miss all of the tremendous losers who picked php and got nothing for it" certainly applies equally across all languages in my opinion.
- chc 10y agoThat's not what was being discussed, though. The grandparent of your comment suggested that, yes, these projects were lifted up by PHP's un-fancy nature giving them focus. The parent of your comment was suggesting that, basically, the companies that have succeeded using PHP aren't any more numerous than we would expect to have come out of the massive PHP userbase even if PHP doesn't offer any advantages at all. The observation that "PHP, for quite a few years now certainly has NOT been the language of choice for most startups, yet we still see the majority of them fail" seems to be responding to a nonexistent conversation in which people were positing that startups based on other languages don't fail. Nobody here is saying that other languages magically make your business succeed.
- pcwalton 10y agoI know you're making a parody, but I think I agree with your parody. I mean, essentially all you're saying is "startup success is largely uncorrelated with the programming language used to implement those startups' products". That seems like not at all an unreasonable position. (It's not, by the way, equivalent to the statement "choice of language doesn't matter".)
- chiefalchemist 10y agoLuck. Timing. Culture. Team. Etc. All have a greater impact than language. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand history.
- edoceo 10y agoTraction and Team. Luck is not a factor.
- chii 10y agowhy is luck not a factor? I'd imagine it's the biggest factor that you can't control!
- collyw 10y agoI completely agree with this. There were a host of similar services when Facebook appeared in my radar, I was signed up to a couple of them. Its only because more friends signed up for facebook that it seemed to have a snowballing effect. It didn't seem in any way superior (well except compared to myspace).
- Gruselbauer 10y agoIn Germany, we used to have a VK-like social network aimed exclusively at university students that was big before Facebook even appeared. To this day I have no idea how that died so fast and hard, and how Facebook managed to overtake it when it hadn't even translated the interface. Ze English izn't zecond nature to all ze Germans.