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Poll: What programming language do you use for your app/startup?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: What programming language do you use for your app/startup?

#84

Post by beagle3 »

fab13n wrote: post #55

I'm suspicious about people who put too much importance into their language choice, maybe because I'm tempted to be one of them. You can love beautiful programs, or programs that get things done. The former people tend to gravitate toward things like Haskell, which is very pure, conceptually beautiful, and feels like using the LHC to crack nuts. But hey, you're using LHC, great fun. The latter will pick whatever ugly…

While that is ultimately true, in the first days (especially pre-investment), the largest expense is programmer's salary, whether that is something you pay, or an opportunity you forego. Thus, getting to a fundable prototype twice as fast, or to a more robust system at the same time IS a factor.

Regardless of how much focus you put on it, it is usually the first "hard" decision everyone has to take in their tech-supported startup, and thus it gets a spotlight.

Re: Poll: What programming language do you use for your app/startup?

#85

Post by Zev »

brettmjohnson wrote: post #60
bobbyi wrote: post #10

You should probably (if it's possible to edit) add Objective C for people doing iPhone development. Also, Actionscript/ Flash might be nice to include since it would be interesting to see how its usage compares to Javascript.

Why just Obj-C for iPhone (or more accurately iOS) dev? What about Objective-C for Mac development?

There are far, far less startups doing Mac development than there are doing iPhone development.

Re: Poll: What programming language do you use for your app/startup?

#86

Post by mfukar »

I have two projects. One's a framework and application in C, with some utilities for it in Ruby (plain, no frameworks). The other one is in Python just because I thought it'd be a good way to learn the language in depth.

At my day job, we're using C, with our tests in Python (using robotframework [1]) and testing frameworks in C++.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/

Re: Poll: What programming language do you use for your app/startup?

#89

Post by RyanMcGreal »

fab13n wrote: post #55

I'm suspicious about people who put too much importance into their language choice, maybe because I'm tempted to be one of them. You can love beautiful programs, or programs that get things done. The former people tend to gravitate toward things like Haskell, which is very pure, conceptually beautiful, and feels like using the LHC to crack nuts. But hey, you're using LHC, great fun. The latter will pick whatever ugly…

Your characterization seems a bit too binary. When I have a choice I code in Python, because it seems to provide a really nice balance between beauty and practicality. It's an elegant, well-designed language that also has a rich, diverse, mature ecosystem of standard and third-party libraries and frameworks.

Re: Poll: What programming language do you use for your app/startup?

#90

Post by lhnn »

abp wrote: post #77
lhnn wrote: post #27

I've fallen for Scala, and want to use one of the frameworks that support it. Lift requires use of Maven or sbt, both of which are annoying tools. I don't want you to force me to download stuff from the net every time I start a project! With most frameworks, I should be able to download a package that I can put on a laptop, disconnect, and build projects in a vacuum. Lift doesn't allow me to do this... also XML :(

http://www.playframework.org/ supports Scala too.

I am looking into it and like its Grails-like setup, but its Scala documentation is outdated and I'm not sure how stable Scala support actually is... I will definitely keep an eye on it, and might even dig into the code a little.
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