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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

#51

Post by inopinatus »

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…

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.

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

#52

Post by mlnj »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #29
ackbar03 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no way, is that actually possible?

Excel is extremely well optimized and can easily handle GB size CSVs

At a company I used to work for there were tales of an early admin guy handling all of payroll, employee directory, and tonnes of admin task data for multiple hundreds of employees in Excel. Guy was an Excel god.

It worked perfectly fine until it was move into a proper database with in house built portals to handle the tasks.

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

#53

Post by csmattryder »

donw wrote: post #49
csmattryder wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 techn…

> 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

Yeah, as stated above, I used to build on .NET back when WinForms was king. ASP MVC wasn't fun to write, Rails was a blast.

If you haven't got C# experience, I can understand the apprehension.

History repeats itself and almost definitely MS will get it wrong again for .NET, but right now, the money is good and the tech is interesting if you're into web tech and C#.

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

#54

Post by avasthe »

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?

Lack of type safety and design with no regards to performance.

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

#55

Post by donw »

inopinatus wrote: post #50
donw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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) delivering enough scale to meet your expected needs for the current business cycle.

For a new startup, you can probably get by with a Rails app on a single Digital Ocean droplet, with plans to scale horizontally. For an established business, you might have a large data warehousing operation running custom C++ code across multiple datacenters, of which the web frontend is a tiny (but important) part.

Good software engineering makes the steps between "New Startup" and "Established Business" as painless as possible, with a minimum of additional overhead.

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

#56

Post by donw »

csmattryder wrote: post #53
donw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 techn…

> 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 Yeah, as stated above, I used to build on .NET back when WinForms was king. ASP MVC wasn't fun to write, Rails was a blast. If you haven't got C# experience, I can understand the apprehension. History repeats itself and almost definitely MS will get it wrong ag…

> History repeats itself

I would go with "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes". :)

> definitely MS will get it wrong again

Oh, definitely. And I agree -- Microsoft is doing some interesting stuff right now. VSCode has made a big splash, they bought GitHub, etc.

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

#57

Post by Toutouxc »

inopinatus wrote: post #51
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…

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

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

#58

Post by AlchemistCamp »

m0zg wrote: post #46
jamil7 wrote: post #9

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200826060913/https://charliere... Looks like HN brought it down.

Clearly they should have used a higher performance programming language. :-)

Nah, getting their MVP up quickly let them validate. Now they know it's worth the effort to scale ;)

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

#59

Post by davedx »

brainless wrote: post #17
johnny_reilly wrote: post #4

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…

I use Python by choice and the more there is growing need for Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Data Mining, the more I can not leave Python. I try Rust, Ruby and others on the side. But Python is just so heavily fortified now that I constantly suggest startups who are going to build non-trivial tech to select Python. Also the whole Linux, deployment, etc. space is filled with Python. Biology, Physics, M…

Hmm. If you believe in microservices then I think it's fine to use python for your ML pipelines and API's, and some other language for the rest of your application software.

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

#60

Post by codesections »

This serves as an interesting counterpoint to Paul Graham's Beating the Averages[0] essay (which argues for using a powerful programming language as a secret weapon to allow a startup to outperform its competitors).

Reading this list, I'm struck by just how mainstream the languages are. I don't have anything against Python or Ruby, but it'd be hard to describe either as a secret weapon — indeed, about the only "secret weapon" languages on that list are Lisp and Elixir, each of which shows up only once.

[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

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