Advanced programming languages (2009)
matt.might.net
Advanced programming languages (2009)
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Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#2I personally would really hesitate before picking a language that will be hard to hire for to build a business around. Yes, you'll be more productive in the short-term, but a business is more than just code and you will need to wear those hats too before you'll have enough understanding and resources to hire those out.
At this point, I'm fairly certain your first hire should be someone to take the engineering load off of you. Engineering will be the only thing you really, truly understand about your business and so it will be the only thing you'll be able to effectively manage others doing.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#3> In academic research and in entrepreneurship, you need to multiply your effectiveness as a programmer, and since you (probably) won't be working with an entrenched code base, you are free to use whatever language best suits the task at hand.
... with the extreme caveat that your language has bindings to {insert language with libraries that already implement 50-85% of your functionality}.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#4Select the best language for the task in hand.
At the end of the day, they all ultimately control the same instruction sets on the chip's either directly or indirectly through a framework or libray and/or operating system.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#5I personally would really hesitate before picking a language that will be hard to hire for to build a business around. Yes, you'll be more productive in the short-term, but a business is more than just code and you will need to wear those hats too before you'll have enough understanding and resources to hire those out. At this point, I'm fairly certain your first hire should be someone to take the engineering load of…
> you'll be more productive in the short-term
I'm not so sure. One of the advantages of these more mainstream languages is the combination of an incredibly large selection of libraries and many people having already made the mistake you will make. This means when you run into an issue, there are already several posts on stack overflow about it, and you move on without issue.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#6I'm really surprised that "Learn you a Haskell" is not in the Haskell resources list.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#7I personally would really hesitate before picking a language that will be hard to hire for to build a business around. Yes, you'll be more productive in the short-term, but a business is more than just code and you will need to wear those hats too before you'll have enough understanding and resources to hire those out. At this point, I'm fairly certain your first hire should be someone to take the engineering load of…
> you'll be more productive in the short-term I'm not so sure. One of the advantages of these more mainstream languages is the combination of an incredibly large selection of libraries and many people having already made the mistake you will make. This means when you run into an issue, there are already several posts on stack overflow about it, and you move on without issue.
The really interesting problems have the property that there is no library written for them yet. Granted, you need some kind of interaction with the outside world, but this is easy to handle in another language layer.
The "existing libraries" are only going to be efficient if your entrepreneurship is based around the idea of rehashing or recombining existing tooling, which is already there. But far from all projects has that property.
Also, one of the really intriguing thing about splitting your service into smaller micro-service based architectures, is that you can mix and match different languages. Which gives you the ability to pick languages which suits a solution.
A good example is the TensorFlow system by Google. Model building usually happens in Python, but you then load that model into a thin C++ layer which serves the requests on the network as a standalone application. The same approach can be taken with some of the more advanced languages.
Even better, as a startup, the least of your worries straight away is horizontal scaling. Modern machines are so fast you can run an incredible amount of concurrency on a single large node, so why bother too much with scaling? This help the micro-service model even more, as there is less reason to worry about the communication overhead.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#8I personally would really hesitate before picking a language that will be hard to hire for to build a business around. Yes, you'll be more productive in the short-term, but a business is more than just code and you will need to wear those hats too before you'll have enough understanding and resources to hire those out. At this point, I'm fairly certain your first hire should be someone to take the engineering load of…
"I personally would really hesitate before picking a language that will be hard to hire for to build a business around"
Unfortunately, this is HN so we know you're wrong:
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#9For a real world project pick a suitable language that will not only help you to implement whatever you have to implement but also to maintain the project. Also you should be able to find other programmers knowing that language if you need to. Maybe even use the language you already know even if it is not the newest and hottest stuff.
But for private or side projects use whatever enlightens you. Those projects should be fun and it's always good to learn new things on the way. I even think you don't have to learn all new languages in depth but just do a small project and reflect if it is something that gets you somewhere. You probably wont write a big business application in Smalltalk but all that message passing, awesome. Seriously have a look at Smalltalk.
Re: Advanced programming languages (2009)
#10I'm really surprised that "Learn you a Haskell" is not in the Haskell resources list.
I've seen people recommending this book more recently:
http://haskellbook.com/
I'm not sure I like LYAH as a practical resource: It's silly and might put people at ease, but I wouldn't feel comfortable writing a database or parsing tool or compiler after reading it.
Real World Haskell is better for these, but is a little dated by now.