5 ms·

Ask HN: Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Ruby for your startup?

13 points by inodeman 16y ago

What JVM Language are you using for your startup? if any. Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Ruby? For what layers? And why?

DanielRibeiro 16y ago
Not actually using any, but if scale problems come, we have the following order: Jruby, Clojure, Scala. The reasons behind the order: * Jruby, because we really like the level of metaprogramming of ruby, the readability, the ammount of libraries, the effort Charles Nutter put into making it a very good port of ruby, and the library support that feels like ruby (dsl-ish, easy to use, easy to change, with tests as documentation, etc), even if you are not using Rails. * Clojure, because it is dynamic, and enforces immutable state (most of the time), it has great metaprogramming support as well (which is very important for readbility), and you can use type annotations to remove all reflection code, and use direct invoking (as fast as java). * Scala, because it is much more convenient to use than Java (and has other advantages, http://bit.ly/4DIKy4 http://bit.ly/4DIKy4), while still being compiled to very efficient java bytecode. Its static typing has issues (http://bit.ly/asQ7FC http://bit.ly/asQ7FC), as its lack of metaprogramming. Implicit conversions, on the other hand, can deal with it for most part. *Java/Groovy: Scala should be the lowest level we would like to handle. Groovy feels a bit like Ruby, it has more metaprogramming facilities (like categories, and AST manipulations are builtin, unlike Ruby's Parse Tree, which doesn't work on 1.9). However, Jruby is the same language we use everywhere else, and Groovy is not faster than clojure. So it is a "master of none" type of language. Not to mention that its stack trace is riddled with java garbage, and it feels a lot like Java, which is really a put off. This is mosty for backend, as with are probably sticking with Sinatra on front end for a looong while. Twitter uses Rails on front end even nowadays, so it seems like we won't have too much problem with it as well.
- WALoeIII 16y ago
  I wouldn't necessarily put Clojure between JRuby and Scala (I hope I am not misinterpreting). I think it should be more along side of JRuby depending on the type of problem you are trying to tackle, it supports a totally different paradigm of programming.
  - DanielRibeiro 16y ago
    This is our options. Jruby and clojure are both dynamic, and we prefer them over static typing of Scala. But jruby is closer to ruby, therefore clojure takes the second place in our list. Scala's type inference makes the typing a lot less of burden, when compared to java, but it is still there. Just our options. Feel free to make your own. People with lots of Groovy experience may choose Groovy, and those who really don't need much metaprogramming support may choose Scala. This is just not our case. Some people also feel very uncomfortable with the lack of almost perfect auto-complete. Ctrl+k (text complete) on Netbeans is magical enough for us most of the time. We use lots of TDD, such that we can also refactor safely, therefore, type safety feels more like a burden when writing tests for things that don't exist on statically typed languages than on dynamic. Again, is a matter of taste as well.
  - rossedwards 16y ago
    The problem is that there really isnt any definition of languages within the java landscape right now. Meaning theres a bunch of languages but noen really stand out for any specifc uses with the expection of people that know them well and are using them well. So its very confusing to know which to use. For example Grails and groovy were supposed to be big on the java framework but due to seveeral reasons they seem to be really more niche. PArtly because it seems the people behind both of them just arent dealing wiht the problems such as bugs quickly enough. Scala is an interesting language but again there doesnt seem to be a heavy push for it. Expect for peopel that are using it and know what its strengths are. All of which leads to alot of confusion about which technology to use. Then theres the issue of frameworks. Theres a million of them but none of them really stand out. ANd personally i dont think it helps that oracle is no running things. On the other hand ruby is known by many people as being pretty powerful and used by alot of startups. Same thing with php. How many startups do you know that use java? I know foursqaure uses liftweb but thats about it.
    - DanielRibeiro 16y ago
      Just because you are not aware of what is being used, does not mean that it is not used. Scala startups: KaChing (follow http://twitter.com/eishay http://twitter.com/eishay for more info, he talks a lot about the Lean startup practises on Kaching as well) and Etherpad (wave-like product, bought by google last year). Eishay also gave a great hint for startups looking for scalable technologies: http://twitter.com/eishay/statuses/20478841811 http://twitter.com/eishay/statuses/20478841811 Flightcaster, which is funded by YCombinator, uses clojure and Ruby on heroku (more on their infoq profile: http://www.infoq.com/articles/flightcaster-clojure-rails http://www.infoq.com/articles/flightcaster-clojure-rails). Most startups are not actually vocal about what they use. Most of them actually are not heard, so they could be as vocal as they wanted and still noone would hear them.
kennethreitz 16y ago
Gah use python!
judofyr 16y ago
I know that the University of Oslo started on a rather big Groovy project, but after a few months ported everything over to Ruby (not sure if it runs on JRuby though). As far as I remember, they felt that Groovy was a terrible "clone" of Ruby: Long and Java-ish backtraces, small community and much broken code. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thomasfl http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thomasfl worked on the project, so maybe he'll chime in with more details.
- cmars232 16y ago
  I'm not at a startup (anymore... we got bought), but we're using Groovy for unit/functional testing. It's a nice compromise when you want something that cuts through boilerplate with metaprogramming/duck typing but can keep tight interop with Java where you need it... and you need a quick learning curve for Java devs. That said, stack traces are horrible, debugging in Eclipse is difficult to impossible depending on how "dynamic" you get, there's no interactive debugger like pdb.set_trace() (that I know of) and the flexibility of the syntax can get out of hand quick. Great for limited use, like making mini-languages and glue for testing. Wouldn't want to support a large application written in it.
  - vorg 16y ago
    Groovy also has a faster static version, Groovy++ at http://code.google.com/p/groovypptest http://code.google.com/p/groovypptest which can intermingle with the more scripty Groovy code using annotations.
ww520 16y ago
You should use what you are comfortable with and most productive. If Visual Basic make your product work, go with it.
durbin 16y ago
python. python beats ruby in community imo. if you're just doing a webapp then rails wins, but with scipy conferences and researchers from astronomy to biology putting out python packages, if you're doing something outside the normal webapp you'll probably find a more useful community with python.
- mdwrigh2 16y ago
  This opinion sounds very one sided. Do you have any experience within the ruby community, personally?
  - durbin 16y ago
    It is very one sided as almost everything I've seen about Ruby is Rails focused, especially outside of japan. Please fill me in where you think the Ruby community has more to offer in a scientific environment.
    - mdwrigh2 16y ago
      This is a completely different statement than your original one. I think there's plenty of support for non-webapp Ruby, and that its very competitive with Python outside of web application arena (look at Chef or Puppet for a couple examples). But Python is _clearly_ the dominant language in a scientific environment, at least between it and Ruby. But like I said, that wasn't your initial statement.
    - rossedwards 16y ago
      I believe python is better frankly at doing mathematical types of things. ANd definitely has more of an engineer crowd to it.
babo 16y ago
Avoid to use Java directly, if you need any Java libraries choose Clojure to wrap it, that strategy works well for me. Scala is another alternative here. It's a bit more complicated to work with Java libraries but great for writing code. For a general programing task my choice is Python, stable, mature, well documented with an extensive library support. iPython is a fantastic shell for it, that's my interface to Python libraries and programs, good for developing, running code, debugging or for a quick peep to the documentation. Highly recommended.
- wlievens 16y ago
  I know that dissing Java is cool these days, but some arguments would've been neat.
  - babo 16y ago
    From my experience Java programming is too slow and inflexible for a startup while there are good and important libraries, that's why I suggest clojure to use them. That's based on first hand experience using various Java projects for a large traffic site, including Cassandra, Solr, hadoop, restlet, etc. We started with java for coding all of these but replaced most of the code later and not for fun. :-)
    - wlievens 16y ago
      That's just too general a comment, in my opinion. Saying "java is too slow for a startup" is like saying "Windows is too primitive for a startup". What if you're making Windows-specific desktop software? Or are we only allowed to talk about ruby-on-rails twitter mashups here anymore?
  - rossedwards 16y ago
    The java landscape right now is confusing and choatic. THeres 5-10 languages around with none of them standing out and no explanation of their use cases. Theres also alot of web frameworks but none of them rally are being pushed as the main framework. So unless youve used java quite a bit its simply easier to use rails or heck php as those are easy to use and are known to be used by alot of startups.
zavulon 16y ago
I'm really curious for the purpose of this question. Are you trying to find the most popular language of choice among HN hackers that have their own startup? Shouldn't you at least mention "and what does your startup do"? Or at this point, "startup" is automatically assumed to be a "webapp"? My startup specializes in bringing other people's ideas into life. Most of our clients are also startups. Depending on their needs, we use Ruby on Rails, PHP, Java, Objective C/Cocoa, or C++. For my other startup, which is a webapp, I use Ruby on Rails.
johnayres 16y ago
If you do decide to go with Java directly consider including Guava (Google's open source common library). http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/ http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/ We really like the support for higher-order functions, like Iterables.transform (aka map) and Functions.compose amongst others. There are loads of useful tools including MapMaker, which is great for building caches. The downside is that Function<X,Y> is an interface and implementations are often inner classes, which can be syntactically quite messy. We've recently open-sourced our common library, which extends Guava with a few additional features we've found useful: http://github.com/mbst/common/tree/master/src/main/java/com/metabroadcast/common/ http://github.com/mbst/common/tree/master/src/main/java/com/...
damoncali 16y ago
Ruby, because it's relatively easy to find Ruby developers who want to work in a startup environment.

13 points by inodeman 16y ago

What JVM Language are you using for your startup? if any. Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Ruby? For what layers? And why?

Not actually using any, but if scale problems come, we have the following order: Jruby, Clojure, Scala. The reasons behind the order: * Jruby, because we really like the level of metaprogramming of ruby, the readability, the ammount of libraries, the effort Charles Nutter put into making it a very good port of ruby, and the library support that feels like ruby (dsl-ish, easy to use, easy to change, with tests as documentation, etc), even if you are not using Rails. * Clojure, because it is dynamic, and enforces immutable state (most of the time), it has great metaprogramming support as well (which is very important for readbility), and you can use type annotations to remove all reflection code, and use direct invoking (as fast as java). * Scala, because it is much more convenient to use than Java (and has other advantages, http://bit.ly/4DIKy4 http://bit.ly/4DIKy4), while still being compiled to very efficient java bytecode. Its static typing has issues (http://bit.ly/asQ7FC http://bit.ly/asQ7FC), as its lack of metaprogramming. Implicit conversions, on the other hand, can deal with it for most part. *Java/Groovy: Scala should be the lowest level we would like to handle. Groovy feels a bit like Ruby, it has more metaprogramming facilities (like categories, and AST manipulations are builtin, unlike Ruby's Parse Tree, which doesn't work on 1.9). However, Jruby is the same language we use everywhere else, and Groovy is not faster than clojure. So it is a "master of none" type of language. Not to mention that its stack trace is riddled with java garbage, and it feels a lot like Java, which is really a put off. This is mosty for backend, as with are probably sticking with Sinatra on front end for a looong while. Twitter uses Rails on front end even nowadays, so it seems like we won't have too much problem with it as well.

WALoeIII 16y ago
I wouldn't necessarily put Clojure between JRuby and Scala (I hope I am not misinterpreting). I think it should be more along side of JRuby depending on the type of problem you are trying to tackle, it supports a totally different paradigm of programming.
- DanielRibeiro 16y ago
  This is our options. Jruby and clojure are both dynamic, and we prefer them over static typing of Scala. But jruby is closer to ruby, therefore clojure takes the second place in our list. Scala's type inference makes the typing a lot less of burden, when compared to java, but it is still there. Just our options. Feel free to make your own. People with lots of Groovy experience may choose Groovy, and those who really don't need much metaprogramming support may choose Scala. This is just not our case. Some people also feel very uncomfortable with the lack of almost perfect auto-complete. Ctrl+k (text complete) on Netbeans is magical enough for us most of the time. We use lots of TDD, such that we can also refactor safely, therefore, type safety feels more like a burden when writing tests for things that don't exist on statically typed languages than on dynamic. Again, is a matter of taste as well.
- rossedwards 16y ago
  The problem is that there really isnt any definition of languages within the java landscape right now. Meaning theres a bunch of languages but noen really stand out for any specifc uses with the expection of people that know them well and are using them well. So its very confusing to know which to use. For example Grails and groovy were supposed to be big on the java framework but due to seveeral reasons they seem to be really more niche. PArtly because it seems the people behind both of them just arent dealing wiht the problems such as bugs quickly enough. Scala is an interesting language but again there doesnt seem to be a heavy push for it. Expect for peopel that are using it and know what its strengths are. All of which leads to alot of confusion about which technology to use. Then theres the issue of frameworks. Theres a million of them but none of them really stand out. ANd personally i dont think it helps that oracle is no running things. On the other hand ruby is known by many people as being pretty powerful and used by alot of startups. Same thing with php. How many startups do you know that use java? I know foursqaure uses liftweb but thats about it.
  - DanielRibeiro 16y ago
    Just because you are not aware of what is being used, does not mean that it is not used. Scala startups: KaChing (follow http://twitter.com/eishay http://twitter.com/eishay for more info, he talks a lot about the Lean startup practises on Kaching as well) and Etherpad (wave-like product, bought by google last year). Eishay also gave a great hint for startups looking for scalable technologies: http://twitter.com/eishay/statuses/20478841811 http://twitter.com/eishay/statuses/20478841811 Flightcaster, which is funded by YCombinator, uses clojure and Ruby on heroku (more on their infoq profile: http://www.infoq.com/articles/flightcaster-clojure-rails http://www.infoq.com/articles/flightcaster-clojure-rails). Most startups are not actually vocal about what they use. Most of them actually are not heard, so they could be as vocal as they wanted and still noone would hear them.

kennethreitz 16y ago

Gah use python!

judofyr 16y ago

I know that the University of Oslo started on a rather big Groovy project, but after a few months ported everything over to Ruby (not sure if it runs on JRuby though). As far as I remember, they felt that Groovy was a terrible "clone" of Ruby: Long and Java-ish backtraces, small community and much broken code. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thomasfl http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thomasfl worked on the project, so maybe he'll chime in with more details.

cmars232 16y ago
I'm not at a startup (anymore... we got bought), but we're using Groovy for unit/functional testing. It's a nice compromise when you want something that cuts through boilerplate with metaprogramming/duck typing but can keep tight interop with Java where you need it... and you need a quick learning curve for Java devs. That said, stack traces are horrible, debugging in Eclipse is difficult to impossible depending on how "dynamic" you get, there's no interactive debugger like pdb.set_trace() (that I know of) and the flexibility of the syntax can get out of hand quick. Great for limited use, like making mini-languages and glue for testing. Wouldn't want to support a large application written in it.
- vorg 16y ago
  Groovy also has a faster static version, Groovy++ at http://code.google.com/p/groovypptest http://code.google.com/p/groovypptest which can intermingle with the more scripty Groovy code using annotations.

ww520 16y ago

You should use what you are comfortable with and most productive. If Visual Basic make your product work, go with it.

durbin 16y ago

python. python beats ruby in community imo. if you're just doing a webapp then rails wins, but with scipy conferences and researchers from astronomy to biology putting out python packages, if you're doing something outside the normal webapp you'll probably find a more useful community with python.

mdwrigh2 16y ago
This opinion sounds very one sided. Do you have any experience within the ruby community, personally?
- durbin 16y ago
  It is very one sided as almost everything I've seen about Ruby is Rails focused, especially outside of japan. Please fill me in where you think the Ruby community has more to offer in a scientific environment.
  - mdwrigh2 16y ago
    This is a completely different statement than your original one. I think there's plenty of support for non-webapp Ruby, and that its very competitive with Python outside of web application arena (look at Chef or Puppet for a couple examples). But Python is _clearly_ the dominant language in a scientific environment, at least between it and Ruby. But like I said, that wasn't your initial statement.
  - rossedwards 16y ago
    I believe python is better frankly at doing mathematical types of things. ANd definitely has more of an engineer crowd to it.

babo 16y ago

Avoid to use Java directly, if you need any Java libraries choose Clojure to wrap it, that strategy works well for me. Scala is another alternative here. It's a bit more complicated to work with Java libraries but great for writing code. For a general programing task my choice is Python, stable, mature, well documented with an extensive library support. iPython is a fantastic shell for it, that's my interface to Python libraries and programs, good for developing, running code, debugging or for a quick peep to the documentation. Highly recommended.

wlievens 16y ago
I know that dissing Java is cool these days, but some arguments would've been neat.
- babo 16y ago
  From my experience Java programming is too slow and inflexible for a startup while there are good and important libraries, that's why I suggest clojure to use them. That's based on first hand experience using various Java projects for a large traffic site, including Cassandra, Solr, hadoop, restlet, etc. We started with java for coding all of these but replaced most of the code later and not for fun. :-)
  - wlievens 16y ago
    That's just too general a comment, in my opinion. Saying "java is too slow for a startup" is like saying "Windows is too primitive for a startup". What if you're making Windows-specific desktop software? Or are we only allowed to talk about ruby-on-rails twitter mashups here anymore?
- rossedwards 16y ago
  The java landscape right now is confusing and choatic. THeres 5-10 languages around with none of them standing out and no explanation of their use cases. Theres also alot of web frameworks but none of them rally are being pushed as the main framework. So unless youve used java quite a bit its simply easier to use rails or heck php as those are easy to use and are known to be used by alot of startups.

zavulon 16y ago

I'm really curious for the purpose of this question. Are you trying to find the most popular language of choice among HN hackers that have their own startup? Shouldn't you at least mention "and what does your startup do"? Or at this point, "startup" is automatically assumed to be a "webapp"? My startup specializes in bringing other people's ideas into life. Most of our clients are also startups. Depending on their needs, we use Ruby on Rails, PHP, Java, Objective C/Cocoa, or C++. For my other startup, which is a webapp, I use Ruby on Rails.

johnayres 16y ago

If you do decide to go with Java directly consider including Guava (Google's open source common library). http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/ http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/ We really like the support for higher-order functions, like Iterables.transform (aka map) and Functions.compose amongst others. There are loads of useful tools including MapMaker, which is great for building caches. The downside is that Function<X,Y> is an interface and implementations are often inner classes, which can be syntactically quite messy. We've recently open-sourced our common library, which extends Guava with a few additional features we've found useful: http://github.com/mbst/common/tree/master/src/main/java/com/metabroadcast/common/ http://github.com/mbst/common/tree/master/src/main/java/com/...

damoncali 16y ago

Ruby, because it's relatively easy to find Ruby developers who want to work in a startup environment.