Picking the right programming language for your startup | Hacker News Reader

Picking the right programming language for your startup

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7 pointscoderdude8 comments

This has got to be one of the laziest "articles" I've ever seen. The final two paragraphs look like a 9th grader trying to slap together a couple of concluding statements for a last minute essay.

Here's a better article about language choice that asks, "Would You Bet $100,000,000 on Your Pet Programming Language?" (http://prog21.dadgum.com/13.html)

Why pick just one? Write components that aren't tightly coupled to others, and you can use whatever language you like for the sub-components. PHP fucks you over? Switch to Python. Python too slow? Rewrite the slow part in Haskell.

Sure, you might have to hire people that are 3% smarter than the average homeless guy off the street, but you're already doing that anyway.

Programming languages aren't religion. You don't have to stick to just one.

I don't see the real value of an article like this. It is just an opinion, but no (scientific) evidence supporting his opinion. Of course the guy has a great backgroup and his experiences at Facebook are definately important but to truely state that a certain programming language is better than an other there has to be evidence. I do know that it isn't easy to conduct this kind of research but without it we can't reach a conclusion.

I wonder why it matters so much that the C# tools weren't open source? Given the BizSpark program gives you them for close to free (and express versions are free) what does it matter that he doesn't have the source code?

The article didn't really go into the depth that I was hoping for, wanted to hear things about not just the performance but how hard it is to hire/learn the certain language, hosting costs, best agile tools etc.

To my mind it's the entire stack that makes it a problem.

For example if you don't feel comfortable using Mono, you also have to deal with Windows for your OS, better experience with SQL server, etc. Even if you use Bizspark to make the up front cost trivial to non-existent, you still have to use those specific technologies.

How many of the types of people who are tech people founding startups prefer their servers on Windows? I sure don't, even though my day to day desktop life is there. It just doesn't feel right. But maybe that's just because my prefered languages for personal use/etc are at least arguably better on *nix environments (Python works well in Windows, but Clojure's not nearly as good, at least once you factor in a lot of the popular tools like Lein).

BizSpark/WebSpark are only free for a certain amount of time (3 years, I think), after which you'll have to start paying for the licenses you're still using.

Also, the Express versions of Studio are quite crippled - fine for hobby work, but not worthwhile for an actual startup where you're going to be working in the tool for hours every day.

Exactly what value is being added over this posting? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1507999

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