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How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

bloomberg.com

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Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#22

Post by riazrizvi »

eggbrain wrote: post #2

If you are wondering how Stripe could even start with just 7 lines of code, it's a bit misleading: With Stripe, all a startup had to do was add seven lines of code to its site to handle payments: What once took weeks was now a cut-and-paste job. I.E. the simplicity of the Stripe platform (taking only 7 lines of code for developers) was how they succeeded, not that they built a startup at first with just 7 lines of co…

Contrary to some of the other commenters I think figuring how the title is true is an interesting game. It's the type of clickbait I don't mind.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#23

Post by shimon_e »

Kluny wrote: post #11
eggbrain wrote: post #2

If you are wondering how Stripe could even start with just 7 lines of code, it's a bit misleading: With Stripe, all a startup had to do was add seven lines of code to its site to handle payments: What once took weeks was now a cut-and-paste job. I.E. the simplicity of the Stripe platform (taking only 7 lines of code for developers) was how they succeeded, not that they built a startup at first with just 7 lines of co…

To expand, it's these 7 lines. (Actually 12) - more or less. Maybe not precisely that, but it's the bit where you add a payment form to your website. It's a nice headline, but it really leaves out the tremendous amount of back-end work that went into making that front end easy to use.

The PayPal form is roughly the same number of lines. The real break through for stripe was it was an alternative to PayPal with a modern UI.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#24

Post by legohead »

Kluny wrote: post #11
eggbrain wrote: post #2

If you are wondering how Stripe could even start with just 7 lines of code, it's a bit misleading: With Stripe, all a startup had to do was add seven lines of code to its site to handle payments: What once took weeks was now a cut-and-paste job. I.E. the simplicity of the Stripe platform (taking only 7 lines of code for developers) was how they succeeded, not that they built a startup at first with just 7 lines of co…

To expand, it's these 7 lines. (Actually 12) - more or less. Maybe not precisely that, but it's the bit where you add a payment form to your website. It's a nice headline, but it really leaves out the tremendous amount of back-end work that went into making that front end easy to use.

Actually it's 1 line.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#25

Post by smaili »

Though not the primary focus of the article, this struck a chord with me:

> When bored in class, Patrick read books. “I would line up the angles so I was hidden from the teacher’s view,” he says, adding that he found out years later that an enlightened principal had instructed teachers to allow it.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#26

Post by tracker1 »

eggbrain wrote: post #2

If you are wondering how Stripe could even start with just 7 lines of code, it's a bit misleading: With Stripe, all a startup had to do was add seven lines of code to its site to handle payments: What once took weeks was now a cut-and-paste job. I.E. the simplicity of the Stripe platform (taking only 7 lines of code for developers) was how they succeeded, not that they built a startup at first with just 7 lines of co…

There's a few misconceptions in the article beyond that.

    and the more modern bits are written by banks, 
    credit card companies, and financial middlemen, 
    none of whom are exactly winning ­hackathons for 
    elegant coding.
Hackathon code is never elegant... it's always piecemeal at the end in order to get it "done."

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#28

Post by agumonkey »

mschaef wrote: post #4

~12 years ago, it was Patrick Collison that was named young scientist of the year for developing a dialect of Lisp called Croma: http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html I'm glad to see he has continued to do well.

Very interesting story
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