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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

#41

Post by donw »

spullara wrote: post #33

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…

Even outside of e-commerce -- I would say anything on the web.

Run something like Ruby/Python for the majority of your web services, and deploy Elixir/Go/Kotlin/C++/Swift whenever you hit a data-munching need that Ruby/Python can't handle.

This doesn't fly if you're doing games, or augmented reality (AR), or mobile apps, or embedded stuff... but the web is still a pretty big place to build.

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

#42

Post by csmattryder »

donw wrote: post #40
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-…

An article from 2014? You should know things have changed since then, with .NET Core and the open-sourcing of most .NET tech (Roselyn, OmniSharp and the .NET Core tooling).

No more lock-in with Windows Server, no more SQL Server. Bring your favourite Linux distro and open-source RDBMS.

I left .NET for Ruby in 2013, and in the last two years, I've come sprinting back to .NET Core. Microsoft is definitely hot again.

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

#43

Post by capableweb »

pcr910303 wrote: post #32
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?

Depends entirely on the dynamic of the two people since backend and frontend has to work well together. When you're in a early startup, you want everyone to be on the same page, so you want people to collaborate closely. If they are people who like to work in silos without talking with each other, you'll have bunch of impedance mismatches at that stage. So you'll want a close team early on and if you can find someone who is good with both frontend and backend and could build it as one person, that'll be better for the early stages. Or two people who can collaborate closely.

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

#44

Post by capableweb »

praveen9920 wrote: post #20

Ruby certainly seems to have advantage in terms of spinning up a basic working product, which matters more than developing a well engineered solution.

Ruby as a language doesn't. It's more about the ecosystem and the popularity of Ruby comes from the popularity of Ruby on Rails, that is what makes Ruby have an advantage of getting started quickly.

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

#45

Post by Cthulhu_ »

spullara wrote: post #33

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…

Pretty much. Solve the problem first, then measure where the bottlenecks are and focus on those.

The premature optimization adage has been touted around since forever but it can be widely applied.

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

#47

Post by Cthulhu_ »

csmattryder wrote: post #42
donw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

An article from 2014? You should know things have changed since then, with .NET Core and the open-sourcing of most .NET tech (Roselyn, OmniSharp and the .NET Core tooling). No more lock-in with Windows Server, no more SQL Server. Bring your favourite Linux distro and open-source RDBMS. I left .NET for Ruby in 2013, and in the last two years, I've come sprinting back to .NET Core. Microsoft is definitely hot again.

But I'm sure you can recognise that .NET has a lot of err, negative inertia; it is becoming a more viable solution, but it's not there yet.

I did end up in a project a little while ago where they picked .net and azure as their technology of choice. Not sure what factors were in play there.

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

#49

Post by donw »

csmattryder wrote: post #42
donw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

An article from 2014? You should know things have changed since then, with .NET Core and the open-sourcing of most .NET tech (Roselyn, OmniSharp and the .NET Core tooling). No more lock-in with Windows Server, no more SQL Server. Bring your favourite Linux distro and open-source RDBMS. I left .NET for Ruby in 2013, and in the last two years, I've come sprinting back to .NET Core. Microsoft is definitely hot again.

Microsoft Research certainly does a lot of interesting stuff, but I think the bigger point is inertia -- Microsoft doesn't have any in the startup space.

Ruby, and to a large extent Python, started from zero, and gained a ton of traction during the whole Web 2.0 rumble.

Microsoft is starting from a negative perception amongst a lot of engineers, and unless they can provide some sort of killer reason to use .NET technologies -- one that doesn't lock you into their ecosystem -- then I don't see them unseating the established players.

Swift and its descendants will be around as long as Apple is, same story for Java and Android. Ruby/Python/Node will continue on in the Web space, with Go/Rust/C++ duking it out for backend services.

This game changes should Microsoft blow a new market open, though, like Apple and Google did with smartphones.

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

#50

Post by inopinatus »

donw wrote: post #39
praveen9920 wrote: post #20

Ruby certainly seems to have advantage in terms of spinning up a basic working product, which matters more than developing a well engineered solution.

Why does using Ruby or Python preclude having a well-engineered solution?

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.
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