121–130 of 156 posts
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I'd caution people outside hyper-growth startups from drawing that much from this chart. People in that ecosystem have very different utility functions than most software engineers. Comparatively, I'm sure a chart with database swapped out for language would show a huge over-representation of NoSQL products like Mongo and Couchbase. Yet for the overwhelming majority of projects the right answer is just use a solid SQ…
I couldn’t imagine doing anything in MongoDB or understand why that is desirable. We have used Postgres from day 1 in March and are now 1200 people. Managing growth with a JSON blob sounds absolutely insane. You need _more_ guarantees, not fewer.
There are cases where it's better when you're using a JSON blog inside SQL. Consider the common scenario where the pure SQL solution would be having 1 abstract model with 50 children that inherit from it, and are only each different by one or two fields.
Having one SQL model that gets queried in one way and in one place, but has 50 different JSON validators, is a lot easier to understand and work with than having 50 different SQL models that get queried in 50 different ways and places.
Some of these are wrong: Rappi used PHP exclusively for it's first year, for instance
If you can send me a source for that (on Twitter @charlieinthe6), I'm happy to make that change!
Edit: oops, I see now it is the initial language. Indeed PagerDuty started using Elixir only later on. Although one could argue Elixir was part of Podium in its initial growth.
Fascinating to see how heavily Ruby and Python feature. The things that surprised me by their absence and near absence were languages I love: JS and C# That said, this is taking now well established startups that will have begun their lives 5+ years ago in general. If I was picking a back end stack then I'd probably hesitate before picking the .NET Framework. But these days I'd easily pick .NET Core. Likewise, I'd wa…
The result of that is that if I lookup basic concepts in web dev today I'll still find a lot of tutorials and courses aimed at total beginners for Ruby. Meaning that even today, Ruby would be a good choice for CS students in a program where they have no web dev course if they wanted to get a small website running.
Now Python is gaining adoption as an introductory language (MIT ditched Scheme for it!). My bet is that a lot of times python was chosen simply because everyone in the team knew it.
If I knew the scope of the project right when running git init I wouldn't pick these two, but my gut feeling is that a lot of these started as "let's get a demo working, we won't have more than 10 users ever anyways unless we get funding!"
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If you're talking about survivorship bias, I can well believe it. Ruby is still popular with startups, and there's no falloff in Rails usage, if the gem download graph is anything to go by.
Rails download graph: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/projects/rails
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Curious where in javascript you saw a lot of unpredictability?
Maintaining JS is a treadmill on fast: takes a lot of work to stand in place, which is horrible if you are trying to get anywhere. We have been ripping out node bc basic backend frameworks are too small and mercurial, so breaking API changes every year on simple things like making an HTTP request has meant a lot of time not spent on our users. The ROI is often ultimately miniscule perf, and ironically, CVE fixes from…
i've always wondered why the Whatsapp acquisition didn't spawn a bunch of startups using Elixir, since a lot of noise was made about how Elixir helped Whatsapp scale with so few people. isnt that how tech cargo culting starts?
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> Viaweb sold for a lot of money. But then it turned out that it was an unmaintainable mess that needed to be rewritten I think that's because the code after the sale had to meet different requirements than the code before the sale. Before the sale, the chief requirement, at least from what I gather from pg's essays, was fast implementation of new features. That was the secret weapon, and Lisp was a key enabler for i…
That's one way of looking at it. I tend to prefer the mountaineer's ethos when thinking about goals for grinding out a new application: Getting to the top doesn't count if you can't get safely back down again.
Startups in your analogy are more akin to: "get to the mountain top and succeed and have the cash to hire a helicopter out of there, or you die (the company)".