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has there ever been a project that became popular and/or successful because of its programming language? does it really matter to the end user what language it'

has there ever been a project that became popular and/or successful because of its programming language? does it really matter to the end user what language it's in if it works well?

rudedogg 10mo ago
The language tends to affect everything, but to give a quick Developer example there’s Zed. Developers use it because it’s fast. Same with Sublime Text. Your criticism makes more sense with products targeting non-technical users though. But IMO tech choices have cascading effects. I won’t buy a vehicle if the infotainment software sucks, and that’s the 2nd largest purchase I’ll ever make.
- websiteapi 10mo ago
  zed is a great example. most people use vscode, that is javascript. which ai code editors are built from scratch that aren't forked vscode?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - rudedogg 10mo ago
    Just Zed (if AI features are a requirement) as far as I know. But to elaborate, they’ve found a niche simply by using Rust and rendering the GUI in a performant way on the GPU. I’m not saying performance is the only thing, but for a chunk of people it is something they care about.
    - data-ottawa 10mo ago
      Good performance is a strong proxy for making other good software decisions. You generally don't get good performance if you haven't thought things through or planned for features in the long term.
- sroussey 10mo ago
  I hate all infotainment systems, so I’m still on a car from 22 years ago — with no screen and ratting me out on how I drive to unknown entities. If I had the optional GPS screen from 22yr ago, I think I would have ripped it out and replaced it a bunch of times or just bought a new car. I’m curious to try the new iDrive 10. We will see…
CooCooCaCha 10mo ago
This post is aimed at developers and hackernews is a technically focused forum. So I care as a developer. If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck?
- grayhatter 10mo ago
  > If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck? Because if you're getting lunch, and someone suggests Burgers, Sushi, or Casu martzu. Only two are actually reasonable. Yes, yes, if I'm allergic to shellfish, I might want to make sure I have an EpiPen before getting sushi. But that doesn't mean it's a meaningful problem.
- pklausler 10mo ago
  I really don't understand the disdain for Fortran on HN. While it's not the most well-defined or portable programming language in the world, it does its job pretty well for those who need it, and has more actively maintained implementations than any language I can think of apart from C.
aeve890 10mo ago
Now that you mention it I think this is a new trend. I pretty sure I've seen more "written in Rust/Go/Zig" than any other language out there. I've never seen a post like "new cli, written in C++" for example. I don't know if it's just some kind of tribalism or a way to attract talent to your project. I think end users don't give a shit about the tech stack of a software. Why would they?
femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
I think I'll take the side of no (as long as it's fast/safe/good) and also I never find the reasoning in these language comparisons to be that compelling anyways. A "why we like $FOO" is better than "why $FOO works better/is better for us than $BAR", since the latter is almost always going to be incomplete.
mitchellh 10mo ago
There are second order effects. You definitely attract different types of talent depending on the technology stack of choice. And building the right group of talent around an early stage product/company is an extremely impactful thing on the product. And blogs are an impactful talent marketing source. This doesn't guarantee any sort of commercial success because there are so many follow on things that are important (product/market fit, sales, customer success, etc.) but it's pretty rough to succeed in the follow ons when the product itself is shit. For first order effects, if a product's target market is developer oriented, then marketing to things developers care about such as a programming language will help initial adoption. It can also help the tool get talked about more organically via user blogs, social media, word of mouth, etc. Basically, yeah, it matters, but as a cog in a big machine like all things.
- RustSupremacist 10mo ago
  What does it say about your latest project that it attracts the most toxic types from Germany to China^? Are you even aware? Do you consider this "building the right group of talent" for your project? ^https://xcancel.com/QULuseslignux/status/1918296149724692968 https://xcancel.com/QULuseslignux/status/1918296149724692968
gorjusborg 10mo ago
There's a big part of me that agrees with your implied conclusion, that it shouldn't matter. On the other hand, I've found that core decisions like language ecosystem choice can be a good leading indicator of other seemingly unrelated decisions. When I see someone choose a tool that I think is extremely well suited for a purpose, it makes me curious to see what else we agree on. The Oven team, the ones who created the Bun runtime, is a good example for me. I think Zig is probably the best compromise out there right now, for my sensibilities. The Oven folks, who chose to use Zig to implement Bun, _also_ made a lot of product decisions I really agree with.
- karmakaze 10mo ago
  This is one of my assessments/red-flags when interviewing with a company. Their tech stack/choices is a reflection of their engineering culture. If they chose Zig or Rust, I'd want to hear why that was a better choice than using a gc'd language.
  - Milpotel 10mo ago
    > If they chose Zig or Rust, I'd want to hear why that was a better choice than using a gc'd language. Come on, they advertise with benchmarks hence it's quite obvious why they didn't chose a gc'd language.
    - karmakaze 10mo ago
      Oh yes I know they do in this post, I meant more generally. Even myself I often wish I had a need to use a lower-level, cooler language, but the pragmatic side of me just can't justify it.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
yahoozoo2 10mo ago
[dead]
cgh 10mo ago
https://paulgraham.com/avg.html https://paulgraham.com/avg.html Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator, the company that hosts Hacker News.
karmakaze 10mo ago
Yes. I don't think Linux would have succeeded if written in a language other than C. Today is a different story. Yes it matters to me as an end user if my web browser is more or less likely to have vulnerabilities in it. Choice of programming language has an impact on that. It doesn't have to be Rust, I'd use a browser written in Pony. If I were making something that had to be low-level and not have security bugs, my statement would be: > I’m not smart enough to build a big multi-threaded project in a manual memory-managed language that doesn't have vulnerabilities. I want help from the language & compiler. The size and longevity of the team matters a lot too. The larger it gets the more problematic it is to keep the bugs out.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Milpotel 10mo ago
The opposite is true: there are a lot of projects that failed because of the chosen language.
- OnionBlender 10mo ago
  What are some famous examples?
  - Milpotel 10mo ago
    Eclipse, Azureus, Minecraft, MySpace with ColdFusion, OpenOffice's Java parts...
    - DANmode 10mo ago
      These are the failed projects?!
      - Milpotel 10mo ago
        These are the "famous" failed projects. All of them lost most of their user base or required a rewrite or lost to a faster competitor.
    - metaltyphoon 10mo ago
      > Minecraft Typo?
      - Milpotel 10mo ago
        Why? It's horrendously slow thanks to the wrong language choice and also required a rewrite (bedrock).
9rx 10mo ago
Most seem to agree that NeXTSTEP/macOS/iOS wouldn't have succeeded without Objective-C. So much of the functionality that made it stand out was predicated on Objective-C's somewhat unique programming model. Of course, it's all just 1s and 0s at the end of the day. You can ultimately accomplish the same in any language. But the design of the language does shape the way developers end up thinking about the problems. If NeXT had used, say, C++ instead, it is unlikely that the people involved would have ever come to recognize the same possibilities.
ok123456 10mo ago
Ruby on Rails.
DanielHB 10mo ago
There have been some large scale companies that went under because of platforms chosen to develop their products in. First that comes to mind is MySpace with Dreamweaver.

has there ever been a project that became popular and/or successful because of its programming language? does it really matter to the end user what language it's in if it works well?

rudedogg 10mo ago

The language tends to affect everything, but to give a quick Developer example there’s Zed. Developers use it because it’s fast. Same with Sublime Text. Your criticism makes more sense with products targeting non-technical users though. But IMO tech choices have cascading effects. I won’t buy a vehicle if the infotainment software sucks, and that’s the 2nd largest purchase I’ll ever make.

websiteapi 10mo ago
zed is a great example. most people use vscode, that is javascript. which ai code editors are built from scratch that aren't forked vscode?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- rudedogg 10mo ago
  Just Zed (if AI features are a requirement) as far as I know. But to elaborate, they’ve found a niche simply by using Rust and rendering the GUI in a performant way on the GPU. I’m not saying performance is the only thing, but for a chunk of people it is something they care about.
  - data-ottawa 10mo ago
    Good performance is a strong proxy for making other good software decisions. You generally don't get good performance if you haven't thought things through or planned for features in the long term.
sroussey 10mo ago
I hate all infotainment systems, so I’m still on a car from 22 years ago — with no screen and ratting me out on how I drive to unknown entities. If I had the optional GPS screen from 22yr ago, I think I would have ripped it out and replaced it a bunch of times or just bought a new car. I’m curious to try the new iDrive 10. We will see…

CooCooCaCha 10mo ago

This post is aimed at developers and hackernews is a technically focused forum. So I care as a developer. If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck?

grayhatter 10mo ago
> If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck? Because if you're getting lunch, and someone suggests Burgers, Sushi, or Casu martzu. Only two are actually reasonable. Yes, yes, if I'm allergic to shellfish, I might want to make sure I have an EpiPen before getting sushi. But that doesn't mean it's a meaningful problem.
pklausler 10mo ago
I really don't understand the disdain for Fortran on HN. While it's not the most well-defined or portable programming language in the world, it does its job pretty well for those who need it, and has more actively maintained implementations than any language I can think of apart from C.

aeve890 10mo ago

Now that you mention it I think this is a new trend. I pretty sure I've seen more "written in Rust/Go/Zig" than any other language out there. I've never seen a post like "new cli, written in C++" for example. I don't know if it's just some kind of tribalism or a way to attract talent to your project. I think end users don't give a shit about the tech stack of a software. Why would they?

femiagbabiaka 10mo ago

I think I'll take the side of no (as long as it's fast/safe/good) and also I never find the reasoning in these language comparisons to be that compelling anyways. A "why we like $FOO" is better than "why $FOO works better/is better for us than $BAR", since the latter is almost always going to be incomplete.

mitchellh 10mo ago

There are second order effects. You definitely attract different types of talent depending on the technology stack of choice. And building the right group of talent around an early stage product/company is an extremely impactful thing on the product. And blogs are an impactful talent marketing source. This doesn't guarantee any sort of commercial success because there are so many follow on things that are important (product/market fit, sales, customer success, etc.) but it's pretty rough to succeed in the follow ons when the product itself is shit. For first order effects, if a product's target market is developer oriented, then marketing to things developers care about such as a programming language will help initial adoption. It can also help the tool get talked about more organically via user blogs, social media, word of mouth, etc. Basically, yeah, it matters, but as a cog in a big machine like all things.

RustSupremacist 10mo ago
What does it say about your latest project that it attracts the most toxic types from Germany to China^? Are you even aware? Do you consider this "building the right group of talent" for your project? ^https://xcancel.com/QULuseslignux/status/1918296149724692968 https://xcancel.com/QULuseslignux/status/1918296149724692968

gorjusborg 10mo ago

There's a big part of me that agrees with your implied conclusion, that it shouldn't matter. On the other hand, I've found that core decisions like language ecosystem choice can be a good leading indicator of other seemingly unrelated decisions. When I see someone choose a tool that I think is extremely well suited for a purpose, it makes me curious to see what else we agree on. The Oven team, the ones who created the Bun runtime, is a good example for me. I think Zig is probably the best compromise out there right now, for my sensibilities. The Oven folks, who chose to use Zig to implement Bun, _also_ made a lot of product decisions I really agree with.

karmakaze 10mo ago
This is one of my assessments/red-flags when interviewing with a company. Their tech stack/choices is a reflection of their engineering culture. If they chose Zig or Rust, I'd want to hear why that was a better choice than using a gc'd language.
- Milpotel 10mo ago
  > If they chose Zig or Rust, I'd want to hear why that was a better choice than using a gc'd language. Come on, they advertise with benchmarks hence it's quite obvious why they didn't chose a gc'd language.
  - karmakaze 10mo ago
    Oh yes I know they do in this post, I meant more generally. Even myself I often wish I had a need to use a lower-level, cooler language, but the pragmatic side of me just can't justify it.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

yahoozoo2 10mo ago

[dead]

cgh 10mo ago

https://paulgraham.com/avg.html https://paulgraham.com/avg.html Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator, the company that hosts Hacker News.

karmakaze 10mo ago

Yes. I don't think Linux would have succeeded if written in a language other than C. Today is a different story. Yes it matters to me as an end user if my web browser is more or less likely to have vulnerabilities in it. Choice of programming language has an impact on that. It doesn't have to be Rust, I'd use a browser written in Pony. If I were making something that had to be low-level and not have security bugs, my statement would be: > I’m not smart enough to build a big multi-threaded project in a manual memory-managed language that doesn't have vulnerabilities. I want help from the language & compiler. The size and longevity of the team matters a lot too. The larger it gets the more problematic it is to keep the bugs out.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

Milpotel 10mo ago

The opposite is true: there are a lot of projects that failed because of the chosen language.

OnionBlender 10mo ago
What are some famous examples?
- Milpotel 10mo ago
  Eclipse, Azureus, Minecraft, MySpace with ColdFusion, OpenOffice's Java parts...
  - DANmode 10mo ago
    These are the failed projects?!
    - Milpotel 10mo ago
      These are the "famous" failed projects. All of them lost most of their user base or required a rewrite or lost to a faster competitor.
  - metaltyphoon 10mo ago
    > Minecraft Typo?
    - Milpotel 10mo ago
      Why? It's horrendously slow thanks to the wrong language choice and also required a rewrite (bedrock).

9rx 10mo ago

Most seem to agree that NeXTSTEP/macOS/iOS wouldn't have succeeded without Objective-C. So much of the functionality that made it stand out was predicated on Objective-C's somewhat unique programming model. Of course, it's all just 1s and 0s at the end of the day. You can ultimately accomplish the same in any language. But the design of the language does shape the way developers end up thinking about the problems. If NeXT had used, say, C++ instead, it is unlikely that the people involved would have ever come to recognize the same possibilities.

ok123456 10mo ago

Ruby on Rails.

DanielHB 10mo ago

There have been some large scale companies that went under because of platforms chosen to develop their products in. First that comes to mind is MySpace with Dreamweaver.