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YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used

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Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used

#31

Post by hboon »

jamil7 wrote: post #13
gumby wrote: post #5

Seems like age is a factor: ruby had its day and companies of that vintage have been around long enough for some of them to be worth bucks. Python is more perennial (over the lifetime of YC itself).

In my annecdotal experience (could be completely wrong) Python and Django are much more common for the same vintage of startups in Europe as when Ruby and Rails were popular in the USA, I don't exactly know what drove it's adoption here.

Maybe related: One of Django's creators, Simon Willison is British. I think he worked at Guardian.

He's on HN too.

Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used

#32

Post by pcr910303 »

onion2k wrote: post #21

The fact that JS barely makes the list indicates to me that YC companies tend to have entirely separate frontend and backend codebases. That either indicates separate teams of frontend and backend developers, which I think is unlikely in a young company, or that there's an expectation that developers in early YC companies are expected to use (at least) two languages. Something to think about if you're starting out as…

Two devs, each frontend and backend will work out pretty well even in a super-small startup I guess?

Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used

#33

Post by spullara »

Just depends entirely on what you are doing. If you are ecommerce you can basically stick to really slow languages forever as the request volume is so small it should be a small fraction of your application. For consumer scale you end up scaling with caching and eventually migrate or severely optimize - like writing your own language runtime like FB. None of this accounts for all the analytics they are doing which is mostly written in Java and C++.

Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used

#34

Post by nelsonic »

pacificmint wrote: post #8

The page doesn’t list the year the startups were founded. I wonder if you’d see a good correlation to the founding year. More startups on the list use Ruby than any other language, and it accounts for over fifty percent of the valuation. It was very popular with startups ten, twelve years ago, but may since have slipped? On the other hand among younger companions es one might expect to see more Go, Node and maybe Rus…

Yeah, Ruby and specifically Ruby-on-Rails was (and still) is very popular in SV startups. Only one mention of Elixir, I'd expect this to change in the future as Phoenix replaces Rails as the easiest framework to build MVPs.

Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used

#35

Post by wwn_se »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #15
MidnightRaver wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The table very clearly shows the correlation.

Nope. Sample size too small to draw correlation.

yep absolutely and there is also the fact that its a list of VC backed (successful)startups we would need to see the failed ones at least. I would say sound development practices (code review, platform design, testing etc) is orders of magnitude more important.

Facebook started out using PHP and it was so bad they had to almost rewrite the language from scratch. PHP is now pretty decent and Facebook is doing pretty OK.

Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used

#36

Post by [deleted] »

nelsonic wrote: post #34
pacificmint wrote: post #8

The page doesn’t list the year the startups were founded. I wonder if you’d see a good correlation to the founding year. More startups on the list use Ruby than any other language, and it accounts for over fifty percent of the valuation. It was very popular with startups ten, twelve years ago, but may since have slipped? On the other hand among younger companions es one might expect to see more Go, Node and maybe Rus…

Yeah, Ruby and specifically Ruby-on-Rails was (and still) is very popular in SV startups. Only one mention of Elixir, I'd expect this to change in the future as Phoenix replaces Rails as the easiest framework to build MVPs.

[deleted]

Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used

#37

Post by danielheath »

dstick wrote: post #2

The title seems to insinuate there’s a correlation between a startup’s value and dev language. While I think our “inner geek“ all likes to think so - is that really the case?

There is an attitude some programmers have that business outcomes are not their department/problem and they should focus on the tech.

They will (for instance) avoid certain tech stacks, regardless of how useful the software being written is (eg “I wouldn't work for Wikipedia, they use PHP”).

I suspect any tech stack that they refuse to work with is at a systematic advantage when it comes to producing useful work, because engineers who don’t want to think about fiscal outcomes can readily lead you to ruin.

Re: YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used

#40

Post by donw »

iamsb wrote: post #38

The only thing that stands out for me, not a single one of these startups use Microsoft tech, even though DOT NET apparently is quite good to work with, from what I hear.

I think that this article[1] is still relevant. In short, if you go Microsoft, you know you're locking yourself into an expensive ecosystem, one with no viable open-source escape hatch.

Moreover, you need to find developers that want to work on the .NET platform. Most of those people work in banking or in large organizations, and are unlikely to want to jump ship to a startup.

[1] https://blog.jonathanoliver.com/why-i-left-dot-net/

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