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Has anyone done a study on startup success vs language choice? I've never done anything commercial outside of being an employee/contractor, but wouldn't a nich

Has anyone done a study on startup success vs language choice? I've never done anything commercial outside of being an employee/contractor, but wouldn't a niche language make it harder to find developers, and possibly increase hardware costs if It's not optimized as well as JS?

AlchemistCamp 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26461353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26461353
- Zak 5y ago
  Original source: https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startups/ https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startup... Lots of Ruby and Python. What I get from that is that being able to put up a CRUD type app in a hurry is a requirement for most of these companies, and frameworks like Rails and Django make it easy to do so.
  - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
    Ruby and Python being used about equally as often, but Ruby (primarily Rails) leading to 3x the market cap in aggregate... It's important to look at both the numerator and the denominator :)
7thaccount 5y ago
Maybe not much of a study, but there is a lot of examples. Paul Graham developed viaweb using common lisp and ran circles around his competition using C++. I read another one involving APL in the early ~80s for financial reporting uses. Back then with Fortran or C you'd have to have the programmer go back and rewrite chunks of the code if the VP wanted to invert a table, but it's immediate in APL with like a single character change. The programmer would just say "sure", click the key, and print out the answer. So in general, I think dynamic languages are probably better for getting together a prototype for many use cases, but they don't scale as well to a large number of users or high performance uses.
travisjungroth 5y ago
> but wouldn't a niche language make it harder to find developers Maybe? There are less of them, but sometimes there are great people who really want to use a language you’d have a hard time hiring otherwise. But then you have to make sure they’re not just into the language. Some people complain “we’re having a hard time hiring experienced developers in our area at rates we can afford for our weird language.”, but you have to wonder if “for our weird language” is actually the difference maker there. > possibly increase hardware costs if It's not optimized as well as JS? I don’t exactly think of JS as “optimized”. Most languages will be faster. Certainly anything in the APL family if you’re doing that type of work.
ransom1538 5y ago
"According to W3Techs' data, PHP is used by 78.9% of all websites with a known server-side programming language." I am prepared for the downvotes here. But numbers don't lie. PHP is the dominate language of sites that run. If they are up running I would surmise the business is up and running. Facebook is a great example of hacking something together with php. IMHO I think if Facebook started with java it wouldn't exist. It's so fast to just hackup a php script and rsync it.
- Zak 5y ago
  According to the same site, 43.2% of sites surveyed are running Wordpress. That's over half the PHP number, and I suspect much of the rest is running something open source that hasn't been significantly modified by the site operator. I just put up a site running Wordpress. Backend language was not a significant factor in selecting that software. Its ease of deployment on cheap shared hosting was certainly a factor in its initial success.

AlchemistCamp 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26461353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26461353

Zak 5y ago
Original source: https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startups/ https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startup... Lots of Ruby and Python. What I get from that is that being able to put up a CRUD type app in a hurry is a requirement for most of these companies, and frameworks like Rails and Django make it easy to do so.
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago
  Ruby and Python being used about equally as often, but Ruby (primarily Rails) leading to 3x the market cap in aggregate... It's important to look at both the numerator and the denominator :)

7thaccount 5y ago

Maybe not much of a study, but there is a lot of examples. Paul Graham developed viaweb using common lisp and ran circles around his competition using C++. I read another one involving APL in the early ~80s for financial reporting uses. Back then with Fortran or C you'd have to have the programmer go back and rewrite chunks of the code if the VP wanted to invert a table, but it's immediate in APL with like a single character change. The programmer would just say "sure", click the key, and print out the answer. So in general, I think dynamic languages are probably better for getting together a prototype for many use cases, but they don't scale as well to a large number of users or high performance uses.

travisjungroth 5y ago

> but wouldn't a niche language make it harder to find developers Maybe? There are less of them, but sometimes there are great people who really want to use a language you’d have a hard time hiring otherwise. But then you have to make sure they’re not just into the language. Some people complain “we’re having a hard time hiring experienced developers in our area at rates we can afford for our weird language.”, but you have to wonder if “for our weird language” is actually the difference maker there. > possibly increase hardware costs if It's not optimized as well as JS? I don’t exactly think of JS as “optimized”. Most languages will be faster. Certainly anything in the APL family if you’re doing that type of work.

ransom1538 5y ago

"According to W3Techs' data, PHP is used by 78.9% of all websites with a known server-side programming language." I am prepared for the downvotes here. But numbers don't lie. PHP is the dominate language of sites that run. If they are up running I would surmise the business is up and running. Facebook is a great example of hacking something together with php. IMHO I think if Facebook started with java it wouldn't exist. It's so fast to just hackup a php script and rsync it.

Zak 5y ago
According to the same site, 43.2% of sites surveyed are running Wordpress. That's over half the PHP number, and I suspect much of the rest is running something open source that hasn't been significantly modified by the site operator. I just put up a site running Wordpress. Backend language was not a significant factor in selecting that software. Its ease of deployment on cheap shared hosting was certainly a factor in its initial success.