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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#71

Post by eru »

leif wrote: post #68
wheels wrote: post #39

I think as startups grow, they tend to end up with something of a frankenstein-ish mix of languages as they write bits that are well suited to each language. For us I ended up checking C++, Java, Javascript, Perl and Ruby, though we have little bits also in Python, Scala and PHP as well. As a sidenote, we track which programming languages our webservices customers are using and I made a graph of such here: http://blo…

I find it a little surprising that you use both perl and ruby. Is it an issue of "one guy likes perl, another likes ruby", or are there things you find easier in one than the other, in both directions? Or is ruby just there for your API and your internal stuff is perl?

Using both Ruby and Perl is nothing compared to the GHC Haskell compiler using Perl.

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

#72

Post by wheels »

leif wrote: post #68
wheels wrote: post #39

I think as startups grow, they tend to end up with something of a frankenstein-ish mix of languages as they write bits that are well suited to each language. For us I ended up checking C++, Java, Javascript, Perl and Ruby, though we have little bits also in Python, Scala and PHP as well. As a sidenote, we track which programming languages our webservices customers are using and I made a graph of such here: http://blo…

I find it a little surprising that you use both perl and ruby. Is it an issue of "one guy likes perl, another likes ruby", or are there things you find easier in one than the other, in both directions? Or is ruby just there for your API and your internal stuff is perl?

I hadn't done web programming for about 8 years when we founded Directed Edge, and the last time I had Perl was still riding high. So the old stuff, and a lot of the maintenance scripts are in Perl. Ruby has, however, begun eating into the Perl usage.

I still find Perl a little better suited for straight text-processing tasks, not to mention that it's a lot faster than Ruby for such. It's tempting to say, "It doesn't matter." but when you're running tasks that process several gigs of text, the difference between waiting 5 minutes for a job to finish vs. 20 can impact overall productivity.

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

#73

Post by leif »

wheels wrote: post #72
leif wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it a little surprising that you use both perl and ruby. Is it an issue of "one guy likes perl, another likes ruby", or are there things you find easier in one than the other, in both directions? Or is ruby just there for your API and your internal stuff is perl?

I hadn't done web programming for about 8 years when we founded Directed Edge, and the last time I had Perl was still riding high. So the old stuff, and a lot of the maintenance scripts are in Perl. Ruby has, however, begun eating into the Perl usage. I still find Perl a little better suited for straight text-processing tasks, not to mention that it's a lot faster than Ruby for such. It's tempting to say, "It doesn't…

Makes sense.

I feel the same way about text processing. I have yet to see anything else that rips through text like perl does. Over the summer, I rewrote a powershell script in perl and got three orders of magnitude improvement (reliably), all in the constant factor. Powershell is probably the worst language for text processing (it encapsulates every line in an object before passing it between processes in the stream), but I still found this impressive.

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

#75

Post by AdamN »

mixmax wrote: post #34

Interesting to see how everyone seems to be constantly picking on PHP, yet this poll shows that it's the second most used language used for our apps/startups.

It's third now and keep in mind that PHP is 3 times as old as the iPhone so you're dealing with momentum issues also. Most sites more than 5 years old are PHP and the switching costs are too high to leave the language.

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

#76

Post by silentbicycle »

gurraman wrote: post #25

I think that the languages used by people who voted for "Other" are the most interesting to see in this context. Could you please post what language you're using in your project if you use a language that is not listed? I use Erlang.

I use an in-house language and Lua at work, mostly Lua and C for my personal projects, and, after getting really into Erlang earlier this year, I've been learning the Erlang platform (OTP, etc).

I've dabbled in a lot of languages, but those seem to be the ones I've settled on lately.

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

#77

Post by abp »

lhnn wrote: post #27

I've fallen for Scala, and want to use one of the frameworks that support it. Lift requires use of Maven or sbt, both of which are annoying tools. I don't want you to force me to download stuff from the net every time I start a project! With most frameworks, I should be able to download a package that I can put on a laptop, disconnect, and build projects in a vacuum. Lift doesn't allow me to do this... also XML :(

http://www.playframework.org/ supports Scala too.

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

#78

Post by silentbicycle »

Sukotto wrote: post #59
silentbicycle wrote: post #26

You didn't list Erlang, Lua, Scheme, Common Lisp, OCaml, Prolog, or Haskell. (Also, loads of other languages, but I actually know people who use each of those.) Also, adding options to a poll that's already in progress is going to skew the accuracy by quite a bit, but self-selecting polls aren't that scientifically rigorous anyway.

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 J…

I don't mean to be overly critical of the guy who posted the poll, these come up periodically and almost always have those issues.

IMHO, tracking the overlapping between them would be an interesting data point - Python and C, Python and Javascript, Ruby and Javascript, etc. At that point you've got a cartesian product of everything to track (in this format), though. It would probably be best to do the polling completely differently.

Also: "which language + which niche" would be good. This seems to be skewed toward web programming.

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