wasdfan

You're engaging in base rate neglect: the pool of PHP programmers was vastly larger than the pool of LISP programmers when Facebook was founded.

Consider Assembly as a counter-example.

This is base rate neglect: the percentage of people who are using elite tier languages (LISP, etc) are tiny in comparison to the number of people slinging Ruby/Python/etc. All that needs to be shown is that, per capita, LISP users tend to do better. Unfortunately, I don't have such data at my fingertips :)

This is base rate neglect.

The percentage of people who are competent enough (or crazy enough) to know a LISP well enough to build a product out of it AND be interested in a startup AND applying to YC is quite small in comparison to the number of people slinging code in the more popular languages (who are also interested in applying to YC).

Of course YC is funding companies that don't use i.e. LISP/Haskell/whatever is cool. If it only limited itself to the elite/hipster programmer startups (heh), it wouldn't have that many companies to invest in per year.

I can only speak from anecdotal memory, but I'm pretty sure Wit.AI primarily used clojure (arguably one of the most expressive lisps of all time) to go from 0 to acquisition in 18(!) months for what was essentially a pure software product.

Does anybody know of any good articles that discuss the actual performance merits of using npm addons? Aside from raw computation heavy functions (whereby dropping down to C++ would seem to be a good idea a priori), are there are other scenarios where using npm addons is a good idea in the node context?

For example, one thing I have found is that nodejs seems to be horrendously very slow at file system manipulation. Dropping down to a C++ addon thus might be a good idea if you're making a nodejs app that has a lot of file system manipulation involved.

Swig is amazing at quickly converting simple functions (i.e., functions that return an int and other simple types). But if you want to make a C++ function that returns an array or something like a JS object, SWIG doesn't seem to be able to automatically convert it into its javascript equivalent (AFAIK -- could be wrong here).

This is eerily timely (recently have been dealing with npm addons). Glad to see a good article about this, and am looking forward to the author's ebook.

Question on the book (if author sees this): will the book cover the npm V8 wrapper Nan (https://www.npmjs.com/package/nan)?

Is there anything comparable to this in the node.js or clojure world?