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Despite what I’ve read in other comments here I think you’re right. Programmers will always want to stick with what they’re familiar with because it’s easy (I’

Despite what I’ve read in other comments here I think you’re right. Programmers will always want to stick with what they’re familiar with because it’s easy (I’ve been trying for a year to pull myself away from C# and work more in Python yet I still gravitate back to C# for my “serious” projects). I don’t consider the “we have experience in this” argument as terribly valid (why ever move to something new if experience means that much to you). More to the point if you’re starting a new company you have to plan for success. Success means hiring more programmers and picking a language that’s fallen out of favor will inhibit every programmer who comes after your co-founders. Assuming you’ll be hiring junior programmers it makes a lot more sense for your experienced co-founders to learn something new then trying to teach your junior programmers something old. (Look at any programming language that's fallen out of favor in the past and you'll see the salary of coders in that language goes up as the language's popularity goes down) The problem you have is you, as an outsider, can see their problem but you don’t have the knowledge or experience to suggest a solution (“cooler than php” is not a good argument). If I were you I’d seek out PHP programmers who made the switch to either Rails or Python. Invite them to a lunch with your co-founders and let them talk through the issues. PHP has some significant advantages over Ruby and Python yet people are still gravitating away from it. Getting them in the room with people who are part of that movement is your best bet at convincing them

j_col 15y ago
> More to the point if you’re starting a new company you have to plan for success. PHP scales for Facebook-like success. It will handled whatever this guy wants to do with his MVP and beyond. > Success means hiring more programmers and picking a language that’s fallen out of favor will inhibit every programmer who comes after your co-founders. This sounds a lot like the "cool enough" argument in disguise ("fallen out of favour"?). Remember the founding coders can write garbage it any language. Code quality and the choice of language are not related, and code quality of a legacy code base is much more important for new developers coming on board. > The problem you have is you, as an outsider, can see their problem but you don’t have the knowledge or experience to suggest a solution ("cooler than php" is not a good argument). If I were you I’d seek out PHP programmers who made the switch to either Rails or Python. Invite them to a lunch with your co-founders and let them talk through the issues. PHP has some significant advantages over Ruby and Python yet people are still gravitating away from it. Getting them in the room with people who are part of that movement is your best bet at convincing them If the reasons for switching from PHP to Ruby or Python were so clear-cut that they could be explained over a coffee, then everyone would have made the switch. But the fact is they're not: it's largely a matter of opinion and personal preference. So if their preference is to use PHP, why try to convince them they're wrong when there is no definitive right?
- TomOfTTB 15y ago
  When I said plan for success I didn't mean PHP can't scale it was related to the lower argument that very few people under 25 uses PHP anymore. (In truth the benchmarks I've seen show PHP is faster than modern languages) The point is from a management perspective being able to hire cheap junior programmers is a significant issue. Finding someone young, cheap and experiences in PHP is hard. Even harder if you want the people you hire to be passionate about their job (using yesterday's technology makes you seem like a dinosaur to many) Trust me I've been on the other side of this. I, to this day, believe 80% of startups would be better off using ASP.NET MVC. But if I were building a startup I wouldn't pick that as my platform. Because the most talented young developers don't want to work with Microsoft technology. Honestly I'm not even going to bother with your last argument. If being clear cut could automatically cause everyone to agree we wouldn't have political parties, religions and any host of other organizations based around disagreement.
  - flomincucci 15y ago
    >When I said plan for success I didn't mean PHP can't scale it was related to the lower argument that very few people under 25 uses PHP anymore. I wonder where you get your statistics. The three most popular languages I know people under 25 uses (I'm under 25 myself) are .NET (well, not a language, but I mean mostly C#), Java and PHP. Maybe this has to do with the enviroments where this kids learn to code.
  - joshmanders 15y ago
    What? Do you know the second biggest website on the internet is written in PHP (Yes, the backend uses a different interpreter, but the front is still raw PHP) and was started before the guy was even 25?
  - gm 15y ago
    I appreciate you playing devil's advocate on this, but the argument just does not hold water, the masses have it right. Throwing away 5 years experience of your founding team, and throwing in a new language for everyone to learn is simply insanity. Doing so just for the sexiness of the new language makes it doubly so. Nitpick: Why assume PHP is not a "modern" language? Last time I checked interpreted, typeless, trash collected languages were pretty modern. Nitpick 2: Why should execution speed benchmarks matter? In that case, write everything in assembler. I'm not being facetious, execution speed is far down in the list of priorities.

j_col 15y ago

> More to the point if you’re starting a new company you have to plan for success. PHP scales for Facebook-like success. It will handled whatever this guy wants to do with his MVP and beyond. > Success means hiring more programmers and picking a language that’s fallen out of favor will inhibit every programmer who comes after your co-founders. This sounds a lot like the "cool enough" argument in disguise ("fallen out of favour"?). Remember the founding coders can write garbage it any language. Code quality and the choice of language are not related, and code quality of a legacy code base is much more important for new developers coming on board. > The problem you have is you, as an outsider, can see their problem but you don’t have the knowledge or experience to suggest a solution ("cooler than php" is not a good argument). If I were you I’d seek out PHP programmers who made the switch to either Rails or Python. Invite them to a lunch with your co-founders and let them talk through the issues. PHP has some significant advantages over Ruby and Python yet people are still gravitating away from it. Getting them in the room with people who are part of that movement is your best bet at convincing them If the reasons for switching from PHP to Ruby or Python were so clear-cut that they could be explained over a coffee, then everyone would have made the switch. But the fact is they're not: it's largely a matter of opinion and personal preference. So if their preference is to use PHP, why try to convince them they're wrong when there is no definitive right?

TomOfTTB 15y ago
When I said plan for success I didn't mean PHP can't scale it was related to the lower argument that very few people under 25 uses PHP anymore. (In truth the benchmarks I've seen show PHP is faster than modern languages) The point is from a management perspective being able to hire cheap junior programmers is a significant issue. Finding someone young, cheap and experiences in PHP is hard. Even harder if you want the people you hire to be passionate about their job (using yesterday's technology makes you seem like a dinosaur to many) Trust me I've been on the other side of this. I, to this day, believe 80% of startups would be better off using ASP.NET MVC. But if I were building a startup I wouldn't pick that as my platform. Because the most talented young developers don't want to work with Microsoft technology. Honestly I'm not even going to bother with your last argument. If being clear cut could automatically cause everyone to agree we wouldn't have political parties, religions and any host of other organizations based around disagreement.
- flomincucci 15y ago
  >When I said plan for success I didn't mean PHP can't scale it was related to the lower argument that very few people under 25 uses PHP anymore. I wonder where you get your statistics. The three most popular languages I know people under 25 uses (I'm under 25 myself) are .NET (well, not a language, but I mean mostly C#), Java and PHP. Maybe this has to do with the enviroments where this kids learn to code.
- joshmanders 15y ago
  What? Do you know the second biggest website on the internet is written in PHP (Yes, the backend uses a different interpreter, but the front is still raw PHP) and was started before the guy was even 25?
- gm 15y ago
  I appreciate you playing devil's advocate on this, but the argument just does not hold water, the masses have it right. Throwing away 5 years experience of your founding team, and throwing in a new language for everyone to learn is simply insanity. Doing so just for the sexiness of the new language makes it doubly so. Nitpick: Why assume PHP is not a "modern" language? Last time I checked interpreted, typeless, trash collected languages were pretty modern. Nitpick 2: Why should execution speed benchmarks matter? In that case, write everything in assembler. I'm not being facetious, execution speed is far down in the list of priorities.