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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

It's clear that if a powerful language was such a competitive advantage, languages like Haskell would rule the world - instead they're hardly used for business projects.

Along comes Go and in 8 years people have built more production code with it than probably all the functional programming languages of the world combined. If that's not true yet, it will be soon the way the trend is going. And those languages have been around for many decades.

I think this means Paul Graham was wrong - a powerful language isn't a killer advantage. Other things matter more. Like simplicity that means being able to read other people's code and cooperate on a large code base. Strong language tooling. A batteries included standard library. Being able to hire developers not skilled in language X and get them up to speed quickly.

At the end of the day it seems pragmatic wins.

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I've got another heresy coming up:

Outside of very specific fields, language doesn't matter.

I was quite strongly attacked on another thread for implying that WhatsApp is just another CRUD app.

The thing was that I wasn't bashing their dev team. They could have done a crazy amazing job, and it helped their company take off, but what was their secret sauce?

The ability to have an (almost) free SMS/MMS app which worked the same across all devices and worked with numbers rather than names/userid's, followed by network affects.

They could have written it in PHP and have it take off. And a competitor could have written it Haskell and had it fail.

(FB is written in PHP, MySpace was written in CF, Friendster was written in jsp, so logically PHP > CF > Friendster. Therefore, PHP > Java. QED?)

Twitter didn't fail because it was written in Ruby. It failed because of business.

Diaspora isn't FB not because of tech, but because of business.

I don't think you deserve to be attacked for implying that about WhatsApp. You're right, in that the truth is that in the vast majority of cases for the vast majority of cases, programming language doesn't matter all that much.

Perhaps people disagreed with you because it seems to me that WhatsApp is an outlier where a specific language and runtime (Erlang & OTP) provided a clear advantage in a specific domain (realtime networked messaging). In this specific instance, the language provided facilities that made it easier to solve a specific type of problem than it would have been in other languages. It helped them get to market more quickly, and in that way could have directly contributed to the application's chance of success. I suppose what I'm getting at is that I think there's a decent case to be made that WhatsApp is one of those very specific instances you mentioned where the language is part of the company's secret sauce.

That's still no reason for anyone to attack you, though! It's easy enough to disagree in a friendly way. :)

The problem is that WhatsApp really isn't just another CRUD app and it's very unlikely that you could pull off an engineering feat of that scale with a different technology. It is the exact counterexample of what you say.

The thing is that it is a CRUD app. You send it data (text, images or video) and get back data (text, images or video).

That's it.

It's not that different from Facebook.

Now, to get it to scale it may pay to use a high-reliability language. To make it secure you may not want to write it in C. But it would have taken off the same had it been written in Perl, PHP, Lisp, C, Assembly or Erlang.

Maybe it would have needed more hardware.

Maybe it would have crashed a few times.

But it would have taken off nonetheless.

It's literally an XMPP server that doesn't connect to other XMPP servers. I downloaded it and I was very disappointed. It literally does nothing else.

To be fair

> Along comes Go

Really means

> Along comes Google

It's nothing against Go, but we have to be realistic that having Google's weight behind it significantly increases its marketing while also making business owners a little more comfortable (aka - a modern nobody ever got fired for buying IBM).

There are a lot of frontend frameworks out there but React and Angular dominate largely because of Facebook and Google's influence.

That said, every language has tradeoffs. All you have to be able to do in order to have a rational conversation is to acknowledge those tradeoffs. Go has some tradeoffs but there's a general feeling that the resulting balance is worth it.

> we have to be realistic that having Google's weight behind it significantly increases its marketing

It also increases no of expert engineers contributing to project full time.

Yes. A toolchain that's easy to code, easy to test, and easy to hire for provides more business value, especially as teams get larger. Why this is assumed to be some xor with advanced or clever programmers is really too bad, because actually the same toolchain supports keeping more of the solution in the advanced programmer's head over the same experience with a complicated toolchain, in my experience.

It does seem like Rails -- which relies heavily on Ruby features for speed of development -- has been a big part of the strategy of Silicon Valley startups for many years.

Or Haskell is just too different from what most programmers are familiar with. It's not really Go versus Haskell, It's Haskell/Ocaml/ML/Lisp versus mainstream languages.

It's also not like Go is the only popular language. Other popular languages like Javascript, C# or Python have plenty of features and magic. Also, Elixir seems to be doing pretty well, so maybe that's a way for functional languages to gain traction.

Elixir, being newer, was made with modern environments and tooling in mind. Go has the same advantage.

And really, it's Go versus C++, C# and Java that's the actual comparison, not Haskell. That's what Go competes with, and then Python, Ruby, PHP and Node on the web server side.

Lauding Go's success over Haskell is not really saying much.

To be fair, you'll never see me compare Go to Haskell :)

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