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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?

#111

Post by levigross »

fab13n wrote: post #97
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your characterization seems a bit too binary. When I have a choice I code in Python, because it seems to provide a really nice balance between beauty and practicality. It's an elegant, well-designed language that also has a rich, diverse, mature ecosystem of standard and third-party libraries and frameworks.

Agreed, Python hits a sweet spot, largely because GvR managed to maintain a strong anti-not-invent-here culture in the community. Also agreed, I'm quite binary, if not caricatural, in my characterization. But it gets the point across, and I trust readers to put grains of salt wherever appropriate. This being said, if like most projects, yours is more about reusing existing stuff than about writing software components…

I agree, Python is our language of choice as well. The logic we use is that it's in most/all of the cases the lesser of the two evils.

You can always argue "Oh! you are doing "that" use it's amazing and has that built in." However we find that Python focuses a lot on the programmer as well (white space etc...) and that was the tipping point.

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

#112

Post by levigross »

cskau wrote: post #56

Other - Go ( http://golang.org/ ) I'm writing a high-performance webapp that requires some specific data-structures and algorithms to achieve the speed needed. I tried prototyping in RoR first, but even simple test requests ended up taking minutes to answer. Then I conveniently attended a guest lecture by Rob Pike on Go, and had one of those all to frequent "oh cool, gotta try that" moments. I must say I don't regret…

I like Go, it gives me the feeling of python in a compiled language (also goroutines are great)

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

#115

Post by fhars »

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 do actually have a perl script that generates all the obnoxious boilerplate a rails application that does something slightly differen from what DHH likes requires, so I have no doubt that such a mix of languages may come to pass in other places, too.

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

#117

Post by abp »

lhnn wrote: post #90
abp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am looking into it and like its Grails-like setup, but its Scala documentation is outdated and I'm not sure how stable Scala support actually is... I will definitely keep an eye on it, and might even dig into the code a little.

You probably want to have a look at this:

http://github.com/guillaumebort/play-scala/blob/master/docum...

Also, when you can life with some Java code that actually isn't very Java like, you can try the normal approach and later enhance with Scala.

They use compile time extension and Groovy in views to get a lot of syntactical sugar going on.

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