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What language is the majority of startups using today?

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Re: What language is the majority of startups using today?

#54
post #39

No question. PHP. However, this doesn't mean you should follow suit. In particular, PHP works best as a vanilla choice, something to get set up with quickly. The moment you start using e.g. Cake, the point of PHP is no longer and you should look elsewhere. There's no useful answer in any case, just hints and use cases. It depends entirely on what you're building. Heavy single-purpose web app like gmail? No question -…

I disagree. I believe the opposite: GWT is a bad choice, mainly because GWT has to be compiled every time. It's much better to use a framework, including ones for PHP, since PHP is faster than Ruby and most popular frameworks have memcached support, and a great community. Also, most frameworks are evolving FAR quicker than GWT is. Thirdly, GWT will still require server-side coding. You might as well use a framework w…

If you get your eclipse and ant build scripts setup right on your development box, deployment takes a single mouse click. It takes me ~10 seconds to sftp changes to pre-prod, stop tomcat, build, compile, and restart tomcat if you change your java class files on my W2K3 production server also running a stripped down version of eclipse (even less if just working with web files or jsps)

Re: What language is the majority of startups using today?

#55
post #33

Can someone please tell me why everyone is so anti-php these days. I'm been working on my web project this summer in php, and it seems like every self proclaimed web 2.0 site is choosing either python or ruby. I feel like I'm on the wrong side of the road, and php is web 1.0. I wonder though, do users care what language the site is made in? And has usuability and quality of a site become determined by programming lan…

To answer your question, the only thing users care about is what your site does and if it does it well. The only people who care are the other people who are developing websites as well. Basically I see the PHP backlash coming out of many painful personal experiences that hit the limitations/drawbacks of PHP. I've maintained a large social networking site written by someone else and I can tell you it was a stinking p…

Good point, adamdoupe. I've created a large project in straight PHP and it was a mess. Now I work with CakePHP, a framework similar to Rails, and it's 100... no, 1000... times cleaner and more scalable!

Re: What language is the majority of startups using today?

#56
post #32

Perl with Catalyst, DBIx::Class, and Template Toolkit. All the actual every-day code is really simple because all three are designed for extensibility. I just write little plugins that abstract away the repetitive stuff. I also write lots of long-lived systems daemons. They do all the asynchronous tasks in a super efficient way. Not enough people use this technique in my experience.

I just use cron for asynchronous tasks, because it's less complex to write for (just write the script to do the task once, after all), and any unix will already have cron running for other things.

Re: What language is the majority of startups using today?

#57
post #41
post #26

We use Ruby on Rails with a lot of JavaScript for Ajax-y thingies. So far there's only 2 of us, but looks like here in NYC there's more than a few RoR devs.

everyone is going to shoot me for this, but we are building our project in C# (debug time + .NET library),C++ (faster sockets), actionscript (not flex) and ajax

If you can do reasonably rapid development with that, more power to you. :) At least the result should be fast.

Re: What language is the majority of startups using today?

#59
post #33

Can someone please tell me why everyone is so anti-php these days. I'm been working on my web project this summer in php, and it seems like every self proclaimed web 2.0 site is choosing either python or ruby. I feel like I'm on the wrong side of the road, and php is web 1.0. I wonder though, do users care what language the site is made in? And has usuability and quality of a site become determined by programming lan…

PHP is just a rather nasty language. It's got a lot going for it, in terms of deploy-ability, scalability, existing libraries and code, and number of developers and designers who are familiar with it, but it's also got a horribly inconsistent standard library, poorly implemented seemingly Java-inspired objects, and a vast majority of the existing code is poorly written.

There are some impressive PHP projects out there, with pretty clean code (I've been pleased by the quality of code in Dokuwiki and Flyspray, for example), and you can't beat PHP with a stick for availability--you can deploy a PHP app on the cheapest Dreamhost account and expect it to work just fine. That cannot be said of RoR, Django, or Catalyst applications (and don't even think about Lisp or Haskell or Erlang in that context).

Re: What language is the majority of startups using today?

#60
During WFP07 it looked something like this on the backend:

45% Ruby (mostly RoR, but one might not have been using Rails) 30% PHP 15% Java 10% Perl

Almost all of the groups were heavily using JavaScript, as well. In fact, some of them were predominantly JavaScript with quite lightweight back-ends (Zenter and Weebly come to mind). Heysan were predominantly Flash at the time, but I believe they have a lot more PHP back-end code now.

I don't believe there were any Python projects.

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