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As Spolsky recently said: "Making a major horizontal product that’s useful in any walk of life is almost impossible to pull off. You can’t charge very much, be

by lrobb 15y ago

As Spolsky recently said: "Making a major horizontal product that’s useful in any walk of life is almost impossible to pull off. You can’t charge very much, because you’re competing with other horizontal products that can amortize their development costs across a huge number of users. It’s high risk, high reward: not suitable for a young bootstrapped startup, but not a bad idea for a second or third product from a mature and stable company like Fog Creek."

drostie 15y ago
There is another factor, too: we as coders are principally biased to work on projects which are fun, and that can supersaturate this market. So I just spent a couple days working on a project to embed a couple of lisp-like structures in JavaScript for building up properly-indented HTML templates. The idea came from seeing people who were successful at using the C preprocessor to create templating schemes. I might port the code to a language that I'm less familiar with, like Clojure, just to get a feel for that language, but I wanted the core structure to exist in a context that I was already comfortable with and could debug. (Really that's half the reason why I use Node.js -- back in the IE versus Netscape days, JavaScript was my second real programming language and it always has the benefits of comfort, even as I learn more Lisp and Ruby.) Anyway, this happens to be useful for me, because it lets me define macros which I can use to build up XML trees. But now if we come to the question: could I sell it for a profit? -- then the answer is "no, because it was too fun to build." Don't get me wrong, it will save me a bit of time (and it might save others a bit of time) to be able to separate my template-development language from HTML -- but I fully expect that a programmer at the startup of your choice who needs it will also say, "this looks like a fun two-day project, let me see what I can do."

by lrobb 15y ago

drostie 15y ago

There is another factor, too: we as coders are principally biased to work on projects which are fun, and that can supersaturate this market. So I just spent a couple days working on a project to embed a couple of lisp-like structures in JavaScript for building up properly-indented HTML templates. The idea came from seeing people who were successful at using the C preprocessor to create templating schemes. I might port the code to a language that I'm less familiar with, like Clojure, just to get a feel for that language, but I wanted the core structure to exist in a context that I was already comfortable with and could debug. (Really that's half the reason why I use Node.js -- back in the IE versus Netscape days, JavaScript was my second real programming language and it always has the benefits of comfort, even as I learn more Lisp and Ruby.) Anyway, this happens to be useful for me, because it lets me define macros which I can use to build up XML trees. But now if we come to the question: could I sell it for a profit? -- then the answer is "no, because it was too fun to build." Don't get me wrong, it will save me a bit of time (and it might save others a bit of time) to be able to separate my template-development language from HTML -- but I fully expect that a programmer at the startup of your choice who needs it will also say, "this looks like a fun two-day project, let me see what I can do."