I'd be more interested in failed startups vs programming language.
YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
141–150 of 156 posts
Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
#142There's a correlation but I don't think it's the one drawn from the article (programming language). I think that you have to consider the background of the person who would typically opt for these languages to start a new business/project. This might inform you of their thinking and perhaps a language like Java, where the developer is likely an Enterprise developer, leads to more brittle thought and execution. "Move fast and break" vs "thoughtful OOP and architecture" -- It's possible to do that in both languages but you'd rarely encounter a "move fast" Java developer while you'd probably quickly encounter "move fast" Ruby developers.
That's perhaps down to experience having the effect of hardening oneself. You've made the mistakes, you don't want to make them again, so you create solutions that are more robust and by definition "better code" and "better designed". Unfortunately, this can cause you take longer to get to market and if you do have to pivot, can be a harder effort pivoting off of a larger, purpose-built codebase.
Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
#143I'd be more interested in failed startups vs programming language.
Exactly.
Successful startups are analogous to surprising research results in academia, in the sense that we have much more information on them and therefore we can draw better conclusions about these entrepreneurial/academic successes.
Today, every good scientist is aware that having plentiful information on unsurprising research is almost as equally important, for many obvious and non-obvious reasons. This has resulted in journals created exclusively for publishing unsurprising research. [1]
If the most rigorous among us w/r to taking care of our collective body of knowledge are only starting to do it seriously, we can have hope that the industry might ramp up its capacities in this regard at some point - I wouldn't hold my breath that's it's going to happen soon though.
Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
This is excellent, thanks for sharing. Anyone know if something similar exists for JS frameworks (React,Ember,Angular,Backbone, etc)? Would be great to see their popularity over time.
I’m guessing maybe not having a single central repository like Gems will prevent this data from being so easily accessible.
Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
#145So the use of C# dooms my startup? I feel really out of touch having never used python or ruby.
> So the use of C# dooms my startup? I feel really out of touch having never used python or ruby.
No. It may even be an advantage for some verticals such as finance, and some business/deployment models like on-prem enterprise software, especially if being able to fit seamlessly into a customer's existing Microsoft setup would be a major selling point.
That said, if you find yourself contemplating how to scale your Active Directory and SQL Server deployment[0] to accommodate your growing user base of personalized emoji GIF makers, consider that your prior experience with your chosen platform may have led you astray somewhere.
[0] Apologies if the metaphor lacks punch, my experience with the MS stack is a decade or two out of date at this point.
Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
#146This is a lagging indicator. If you did this in 2010, the top companies would all be PHP.
The biggest example of this I can think of is Facebook
Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
#147Even though it says "initial back-end language(s)" it looks like the information is often pulled from the startup's current career pages. Mixpanel is listed as using Go as one of their initial back-end languages, even though Mixpanel was founded in June 2009, several months before the first version of Go was released.
Thank you for pointing this out! Fixed and updated the article.
Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
#148So the use of C# dooms my startup? I feel really out of touch having never used python or ruby.
Nah .net core & c# are nice; you do not have to pick the hippest stuff always. And (very) good .net devs are easy to find and also cheap.
Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that's the best part; in a very wide gamut of cases, they don't, and since both play nice with compiled languages a scaling up can benefit from both worlds.
I would argue that "engineering" and "scale" are different concerns. Engineering is about building and maintaining things fit for their purpose. A bridge that only needs to last for one year is designed very differently than a bridge intended to be used for twenty years. In the case of software, that means (a) building what your users and business need; (b) designing software that is easy to change; and (c) deliverin…
> A bridge that only needs to last for one year is designed very differently than a bridge intended to be used for twenty years.
Yes, but in software, the usual case ends up that the 1 year bridge actually has to become an interstellar spaceship and has to last basically forever.
This happens in other disciplines as well but I have not seen it as extreme as many software projects I saw.
Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can send me a source for that (on Twitter @charlieinthe6), I'm happy to make that change!
Can we also submit it via HN? If so, my understanding is that Pagerduty is running and long-term invested in Elixir ( https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/elixir-at-pagerduty/ ) and Podium has migrated from Ruby to Elixir as the main stack ( https://medium.com/podium-engineering/two-years-of-elixir-at... ). Thanks! Edit: oops, I see now it is the initial language. Indeed PagerDuty started using Elixir only later on. Althou…
Exactly - trying to capture what language they started with.
It was by no means a perfect science - was a lot of digging around on the internet for the oldest reference I could find!