Comment by jerojero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerojero | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't think that it's the tech stack that will make or break most startups in any sector really. I mean, of course, unless you are trying to solve some very specific tech problem then you will need the right tool but if you're in that position you're really not going to be looking at programming languages for their simplicity.

I will confess, I did not know Smalltalk even existed and when I read this headline I thought it might be referencing the ability to make... well, small talk with people. And to that I did think "that might make sense to me". Because it seems like being able to communicate your ideas, entertain and keep people engaged might be very useful tools to have as an entrepreneur, after all, people need to buy into your idea to begin with.

I really think a lot of these advice pieces are just... garbage really? I mean there's good resources out there for start ups but everything that pretends to be a secret weapon, a canned solution to success is always going to be nothing but fishy clickbait. If you want to get serious about it then of course, the tech stack might matter and of course this website being tech oriented we are going to be a bit bias towards it... but the secret sauce is probably everything but the tech stack you choose for your app. In reality, if you want to be an entrepreneur in tech you probably already are capable of doing an MVP in python or javascript. And if you're not, then it might be smarter to partner up with someone that knows.

> I did not know Smalltalk even existed

That's sad, because Smalltalk is the grandfather of modern (or arguably all) OOP languages and is referenced in a lot of famous OOP books. I've never used it, but I remember a lot of folks talking about it in very reverential terms when Java first came to the scene. From what I understand, it was largely killed by bad commercial choices that restricted adoption until it was too late to matter.

That role belongs more to Simula, without which Smalltalk would never have happened in first place.

The biggest impact was when one of the biggest Smalltalk vendors, IBM, decided to reboot their Smalltalk business into Java.

Right, these are the father and grandfathers of all OOP

I don't appreciate the criticisms in the article made to languages that have problems which are artefacts of their popularity.

Some of these problems are merely cosmetic, which doesn't mean they are to be dismissed, but the very choices those languages took were either a result of some school of thought being demanded by the market, or they created that school of thought themselves. That would cover mainly syntax and verbosity/explicitness choices.

He mentions the GIL. Well, this is a well-known Python limitation because... Python has a particular implementation in CPython that is extremely popular, and they made the choice to focus in making every running Python process being relatively fast as a single thread, which turned out to be a good compromise combined with micro-services. Perhaps it was even partly a catalyst of the trend. But by no means this is the only Python implementation, it's just an extremely popular one that needs to be taken into account. Smalltalk doesn't have this problem to have any single implementation that is so popular, it became an externality and people needed to account for its choices.

But on the positive side, I agree with the sentiment that in order to beat the averages, popularity of your tools shouldn't be the deciding choice.

There's a reason why some (powerful, useful) languages remain "secret weapons": they have characteristics that are out of step with the mainstream. But this itself is not a bad thing. Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Scheme/Chicken/Gambit/Racket etc will remain secret weapons with a focus on creation and in not being part of the rat race, while others will be more focused in industrialisation, large team management, etc. The mainstream has to do that pretty much by definition. And outsiders will have the advantage of not having this burden on top of them.

It does appear to me that many startups decide to start off with what they anticipate it will be a good choice once they are big, prematurely. Facebook started as PHP spaghetti code. The main thing is that it has to work, and it has to allow you to move fast. Scale comes later, especially so nowadays with so many scaling solutions on the hardware side that will let you survive early hits in popularity, a problem most people would wish for.

I'll just leave this here: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

"That was true in 2003 and is not true in 2023" might be a reasonable response, but having a solid idea of why would probably pay off.

>I honestly don't think that it's the tech stack that will make or break most startups in any sector really.

Time to market is crucial.

First, time to market with the right thing is crucial. Time to market with the wrong thing doesn't matter at all.

Second, time to market matters, but it does not follow that language matters. The GP's claim was that language didn't dramatically affect either your ability to build the right thing, or the time it took to do so. You need more than five words to refute that.

> Time to market with the wrong thing doesn't matter at all.

It does, though, because it teaches you what the right thing is. The more you can throw at the wall, the more sticks.

Yes, most of these articles are written for SEO, not for humans, and are basically garbage.

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