What's your primary goal? Having a MVP fast, or play with newer technologies? Unless your MVP requires very specific tech (let's say heavy analytics, websockets or whatever) JFDIt. It's hard enough to build something, nevermind the tech.
Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
31–40 of 41 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#32Despite what I’ve read in other comments here I think you’re right. Programmers will always want to stick with what they’re familiar with because it’s easy (I’ve been trying for a year to pull myself away from C# and work more in Python yet I still gravitate back to C# for my “serious” projects). I don’t consider the “we have experience in this” argument as terribly valid (why ever move to something new if experience…
> More to the point if you’re starting a new company you have to plan for success. PHP scales for Facebook-like success. It will handled whatever this guy wants to do with his MVP and beyond. > Success means hiring more programmers and picking a language that’s fallen out of favor will inhibit every programmer who comes after your co-founders. This sounds a lot like the "cool enough" argument in disguise ("fallen out…
When I said plan for success I didn't mean PHP can't scale it was related to the lower argument that very few people under 25 uses PHP anymore.
(In truth the benchmarks I've seen show PHP is faster than modern languages)
The point is from a management perspective being able to hire cheap junior programmers is a significant issue. Finding someone young, cheap and experiences in PHP is hard. Even harder if you want the people you hire to be passionate about their job (using yesterday's technology makes you seem like a dinosaur to many)
Trust me I've been on the other side of this. I, to this day, believe 80% of startups would be better off using ASP.NET MVC. But if I were building a startup I wouldn't pick that as my platform. Because the most talented young developers don't want to work with Microsoft technology.
Honestly I'm not even going to bother with your last argument. If being clear cut could automatically cause everyone to agree we wouldn't have political parties, religions and any host of other organizations based around disagreement.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#33On a scale of 0-100::
Value of technical co-founder(s) with 5 yrs experience in any particular language: 99
Value of language/framework "sexiness": 5
The only marginal value of "sexiness" is that it can attract more forward thinking developers. However, PHP is alive and well. The sheer volume of PHP developers available increases your chances of finding someone competent to work on your project.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> More to the point if you’re starting a new company you have to plan for success. PHP scales for Facebook-like success. It will handled whatever this guy wants to do with his MVP and beyond. > Success means hiring more programmers and picking a language that’s fallen out of favor will inhibit every programmer who comes after your co-founders. This sounds a lot like the "cool enough" argument in disguise ("fallen out…
When I said plan for success I didn't mean PHP can't scale it was related to the lower argument that very few people under 25 uses PHP anymore. (In truth the benchmarks I've seen show PHP is faster than modern languages) The point is from a management perspective being able to hire cheap junior programmers is a significant issue. Finding someone young, cheap and experiences in PHP is hard. Even harder if you want the…
>When I said plan for success I didn't mean PHP can't scale it was related to the lower argument that very few people under 25 uses PHP anymore.
I wonder where you get your statistics. The three most popular languages I know people under 25 uses (I'm under 25 myself) are .NET (well, not a language, but I mean mostly C#), Java and PHP. Maybe this has to do with the enviroments where this kids learn to code.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> More to the point if you’re starting a new company you have to plan for success. PHP scales for Facebook-like success. It will handled whatever this guy wants to do with his MVP and beyond. > Success means hiring more programmers and picking a language that’s fallen out of favor will inhibit every programmer who comes after your co-founders. This sounds a lot like the "cool enough" argument in disguise ("fallen out…
When I said plan for success I didn't mean PHP can't scale it was related to the lower argument that very few people under 25 uses PHP anymore. (In truth the benchmarks I've seen show PHP is faster than modern languages) The point is from a management perspective being able to hire cheap junior programmers is a significant issue. Finding someone young, cheap and experiences in PHP is hard. Even harder if you want the…
What? Do you know the second biggest website on the internet is written in PHP (Yes, the backend uses a different interpreter, but the front is still raw PHP) and was started before the guy was even 25?
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> More to the point if you’re starting a new company you have to plan for success. PHP scales for Facebook-like success. It will handled whatever this guy wants to do with his MVP and beyond. > Success means hiring more programmers and picking a language that’s fallen out of favor will inhibit every programmer who comes after your co-founders. This sounds a lot like the "cool enough" argument in disguise ("fallen out…
When I said plan for success I didn't mean PHP can't scale it was related to the lower argument that very few people under 25 uses PHP anymore. (In truth the benchmarks I've seen show PHP is faster than modern languages) The point is from a management perspective being able to hire cheap junior programmers is a significant issue. Finding someone young, cheap and experiences in PHP is hard. Even harder if you want the…
I appreciate you playing devil's advocate on this, but the argument just does not hold water, the masses have it right.
Throwing away 5 years experience of your founding team, and throwing in a new language for everyone to learn is simply insanity. Doing so just for the sexiness of the new language makes it doubly so.
Nitpick: Why assume PHP is not a "modern" language? Last time I checked interpreted, typeless, trash collected languages were pretty modern.
Nitpick 2: Why should execution speed benchmarks matter? In that case, write everything in assembler. I'm not being facetious, execution speed is far down in the list of priorities.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rebuilding to scale is a bad idea IMHO. The moment your app takes of you have just about everything on your mind, but not a clean slate rewrite in a different language. You'll need to scale and scale fast. So you'll be tacking on hot-fixes for stuff that breaks, features your customers want, ... And the more code you write, the less attractive it sounds to rewrite. I wouldn't try to convince the coders to use a langu…
I'd say the happy medium is a SOA design. If you separate out the critical modules into a separate service, a rebuild to scale isn't much more than a refactor to scale, which you are going to have to do at some point in time no matter what platform you build on.
Yes, sure. There's more benefits to reap: You can intermingle your services with services bought/rented somewhere and eventually replace the ones you're using if it pays of at the scale you reached (think redis2go vs. a self-hosted redis server) Services usually offer good boundaries at which you can separate the system and scale over multiple machines as well as a good entry point for black box testing.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#38You sound like the pointy haired boss in the Dilbert cartoons. You admit that you're not a coder, whereas your friends are "good programmers", but you want to throw away their half decade (each) of experience because you would prefer to go with a buzzword language because it sounds cooler. If they don't have experience in these other languages, the MVP will take longer to produce and will likely be of lower quality i…
Wow. Pointy hairy Dilbert boss. Now that stings. Fair enough, the argument of PHP not being cool really is silly. I get that. You are right, I was wrong.
I think I was a bit too lazy when writing this. Let me elaborate a bit: I am not telling anybody to do anything because I am not their boss. I am a partner. My goal is to spark a discussions, make people look outside their comfort zone and point out that the most convenient way might not be the most rewarding in the end.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#39Sounds like you really don't know what you're talking about. You know those horror stories programmers tell about annoying bosses hovering over their shoulders telling them how to do their jobs, when they really have no idea how to do it? Yeah, that's kind of what you're doing right now.
Sounds like you did not understand what I wrote
* I code on a daily basis
* I am not anyone's boss