Ask HN: Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Ruby for your startup? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Ruby for your startup?

#21

Post by wlievens » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 7:17 AM UTC

babo wrote: post #13

wlievens wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that dissing Java is cool these days, but some arguments would've been neat.

From my experience Java programming is too slow and inflexible for a startup while there are good and important libraries, that's why I suggest clojure to use them. That's based on first hand experience using various Java projects for a large traffic site, including Cassandra, Solr, hadoop, restlet, etc. We started with java for coding all of these but replaced most of the code later and not for fun. :-)

That's just too general a comment, in my opinion. Saying "java is too slow for a startup" is like saying "Windows is too primitive for a startup". What if you're making Windows-specific desktop software? Or are we only allowed to talk about ruby-on-rails twitter mashups here anymore?

Re: Ask HN: Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Ruby for your startup?

#22

Post by johnayres » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 9:35 AM UTC

If you do decide to go with Java directly consider including Guava (Google's open source common library).

http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/

We really like the support for higher-order functions, like Iterables.transform (aka map) and Functions.compose amongst others. There are loads of useful tools including MapMaker, which is great for building caches. The downside is that Function is an interface and implementations are often inner classes, which can be syntactically quite messy.

We've recently open-sourced our common library, which extends Guava with a few additional features we've found useful:

http://github.com/mbst/common/tree/master/src/main/java/com/...

Re: Ask HN: Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Ruby for your startup?

#23

Post by damoncali » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 2:02 PM UTC

Ruby, because it's relatively easy to find Ruby developers who want to work in a startup environment.

Re: Ask HN: Java/Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Ruby for your startup?

#24

Post by mdwrigh2 » Wed, Sep 22, 2010, 3:06 AM UTC

durbin wrote: post #16

mdwrigh2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This opinion sounds very one sided. Do you have any experience within the ruby community, personally?

It is very one sided as almost everything I've seen about Ruby is Rails focused, especially outside of japan. Please fill me in where you think the Ruby community has more to offer in a scientific environment.

This is a completely different statement than your original one. I think there's plenty of support for non-webapp Ruby, and that its very competitive with Python outside of web application arena (look at Chef or Puppet for a couple examples). But Python is _clearly_ the dominant language in a scientific environment, at least between it and Ruby. But like I said, that wasn't your initial statement.