Poll: What programming language do you use for your app/startup?

Recent projects have been in Python, but my current project is written in Go.

Our base language is PHP, but since we are working with teaching programming we are working with a lot more Javascript, Actionscript,C/C++, Java, and lately we have been testing/working with haxe.

I'm suspicious about people who put too much importance into their language choice, maybe because I'm tempted to be one of them. You can love beautiful programs, or programs that get things done.

The former people tend to gravitate toward things like Haskell, which is very pure, conceptually beautiful, and feels like using the LHC to crack nuts. But hey, you're using LHC, great fun.

The latter will pick whatever ugly PHP framework is closest to the final product they want to ship. Most great startup ideas aren't very sophisticated algorithmically wise: existing mature libs in ugly languages beat writing/adapting everything in a cool one, although the latter is a lot more fun; an active and friendly online community, which is familiar with problems close to yours, beats having macros and first-class closures in your language; etc.

In theory people could love both beautiful things and getting things done, but in practice I find that the more strongly they feel about one side, the less they care about the other.

A corollary is that, in fun-to-use languages, everyone writes fun stuff rather than useful ones: frameworks, meta-programming stuff, continuation-based contraptions, etc. So you end up with a dozen half-baked neural network libs, but no decent (and _de facto_ standard) HTTPS client.

TL;DR: the overwhelming majority of startups are about social and economic hacking, not about software hacking. Over-focusing on the language issue is a clue that one hasn't come to terms with this sad truth.

Once I got up and running with sbt, I really took to it. You only need to be concerned about the net when you add a dependency that you want it to resolve by fetching remotely. If you want alternative web frameworks, I think scalatra looks promising.

Those fall into the "other" category. As I write this, "Other" has 5.91% of the votes (52 / 880 votes)

Give the guy a break. You can't list every possible choice and based on these numbers, it doesn't look like very many people use the technologies you listed.

If we (generously) assume only half the users of those languages actually voted, that would change the "other" group to 104/932 = 11.16% which would edge out Java's 6.55% and PHP's 10.84%. It would still fall short of Ruby's 13.95%, Python's 15.13%, and Javascript's 20.71%

Check out this thread for people voting "other" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843229