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Does Ycombinator decline/discriminate against applicants based on their choice of programming language? For example if a startup has their app written in C#/.N

by fraXis 19y ago

Does Ycombinator decline/discriminate against applicants based on their choice of programming language? For example if a startup has their app written in C#/.Net, do they have an equal chance of being accepted into Ycombinator? Thanks.

ph0rque 19y ago
I believe xobni uses C# in at least some of their code: http://www.xobni.com/blog/2007/01/31/kevins-thoughts/ http://www.xobni.com/blog/2007/01/31/kevins-thoughts/
brlewis 19y ago
If your app is decent I would think using C#/.NET would increase your chances. Extra points for difficulty. Anybody can crank out a decent app in Lisp, but YC is investing more in the team than the app.
- danielha 19y ago
  I can't tell if you're joking or not. Take the more difficult route does not make you smarter.
  - brlewis 19y ago
    I can't tell if I'm joking either. Phil Greenspun does advocate the "great programmers can use any language" way. My life situation is such that I can't really afford to take a more difficult route just to show off.
SwellJoe 19y ago
No. But it might help to have a good reason for using an inferior language. There have been many PHP-based products, and a few Java products that I'm certain of. As someone else mentioned, it seems very likely that Xobni are using .Net since they're building desktop Windows software. Our products are in Perl. And Python and Ruby have a few adherents among YC'ers. So, make sure you can defend your choice, and you'll be fine. Presumably you've thought a little about your language choice, so defending it shouldn't be hard. The other YC'ers might make fun of you, though. It really is a pretty stinky language for web apps (and most apps these days ought to be web apps).
- aston 19y ago
  Perl, really? Just out of curiousity, what were your reasons? The close ties to shell scripting?
  - staunch 19y ago
    Why are you surprised that someone would choose Perl to build the ultimate sysadmin-oriented application? It's the obvious choice for anyone making this decision without regard to what's trendy.
    - aston 19y ago
      I disagree. It's not obvious to me at all. Which is why I asked for their reasons.
      - SwellJoe 19y ago
        What do you believe would be the obvious choice for a web-based application that administers everything on a UNIX system? Keep in mind: It runs as root. Directly parses and edits every configuration file that is managed--this is not a "generate config files from a database plus templates" tool--it has to understand the configuration files and edit them cleanly. Strong regex support is vital. It is internationalized to dozens of languages...it needs to support Unicode. It has to be reasonably fast...it serves dozens of users simultaneously, often doing rather complicated tasks. It needs to be a widely available and stable language--we support dozens of platforms (nearly all Linux distros, Mac OS X, the BSDs, and even Windows to some degree). All of them have different versions of Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP etc. and varying degrees of library support "out of the box". We need to know that whatever reasonably recent version exists will work fine now and in the future.
        aston 19y ago
        I would've probably picked Python, mostly because you get all of that stuff with (almost) uniformly better syntax. But I certainly don't blame you, especially in light of the details from above.

by fraXis 19y ago

ph0rque 19y ago

I believe xobni uses C# in at least some of their code: http://www.xobni.com/blog/2007/01/31/kevins-thoughts/ http://www.xobni.com/blog/2007/01/31/kevins-thoughts/

brlewis 19y ago

If your app is decent I would think using C#/.NET would increase your chances. Extra points for difficulty. Anybody can crank out a decent app in Lisp, but YC is investing more in the team than the app.

danielha 19y ago
I can't tell if you're joking or not. Take the more difficult route does not make you smarter.
- brlewis 19y ago
  I can't tell if I'm joking either. Phil Greenspun does advocate the "great programmers can use any language" way. My life situation is such that I can't really afford to take a more difficult route just to show off.

SwellJoe 19y ago

No. But it might help to have a good reason for using an inferior language. There have been many PHP-based products, and a few Java products that I'm certain of. As someone else mentioned, it seems very likely that Xobni are using .Net since they're building desktop Windows software. Our products are in Perl. And Python and Ruby have a few adherents among YC'ers. So, make sure you can defend your choice, and you'll be fine. Presumably you've thought a little about your language choice, so defending it shouldn't be hard. The other YC'ers might make fun of you, though. It really is a pretty stinky language for web apps (and most apps these days ought to be web apps).

aston 19y ago
Perl, really? Just out of curiousity, what were your reasons? The close ties to shell scripting?
- staunch 19y ago
  Why are you surprised that someone would choose Perl to build the ultimate sysadmin-oriented application? It's the obvious choice for anyone making this decision without regard to what's trendy.
  - aston 19y ago
    I disagree. It's not obvious to me at all. Which is why I asked for their reasons.
    - SwellJoe 19y ago
      What do you believe would be the obvious choice for a web-based application that administers everything on a UNIX system? Keep in mind: It runs as root. Directly parses and edits every configuration file that is managed--this is not a "generate config files from a database plus templates" tool--it has to understand the configuration files and edit them cleanly. Strong regex support is vital. It is internationalized to dozens of languages...it needs to support Unicode. It has to be reasonably fast...it serves dozens of users simultaneously, often doing rather complicated tasks. It needs to be a widely available and stable language--we support dozens of platforms (nearly all Linux distros, Mac OS X, the BSDs, and even Windows to some degree). All of them have different versions of Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP etc. and varying degrees of library support "out of the box". We need to know that whatever reasonably recent version exists will work fine now and in the future.
      - aston 19y ago
        I would've probably picked Python, mostly because you get all of that stuff with (almost) uniformly better syntax. But I certainly don't blame you, especially in light of the details from above.