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Comment by jamroom | Hacker News Reader

I've gone one step further and created a template:

Some companies are succeeding in spite of [insert language]. There are many, many users of [insert language], and we'd expect that there would be considerable variance, with some users doing awful (no traction, buggy sites, etc) and some hitting home runs (facebook). Because it's such a popular language, it will have users across this entire spectrum.

It's easy to cherry-pick the winners and miss all of the tremendous losers who picked [insert language] and got nothing for it.

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I know you're making a parody, but I think I agree with your parody.

I mean, essentially all you're saying is "startup success is largely uncorrelated with the programming language used to implement those startups' products". That seems like not at all an unreasonable position.

(It's not, by the way, equivalent to the statement "choice of language doesn't matter".)

Luck. Timing. Culture. Team. Etc. All have a greater impact than language. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand history.

Traction and Team. Luck is not a factor.

why is luck not a factor? I'd imagine it's the biggest factor that you can't control!

I completely agree with this. There were a host of similar services when Facebook appeared in my radar, I was signed up to a couple of them. Its only because more friends signed up for facebook that it seemed to have a snowballing effect. It didn't seem in any way superior (well except compared to myspace).

In Germany, we used to have a VK-like social network aimed exclusively at university students that was big before Facebook even appeared. To this day I have no idea how that died so fast and hard, and how Facebook managed to overtake it when it hadn't even translated the interface. Ze English izn't zecond nature to all ze Germans.

Ah yes, the * VZs. From my perspective, there's a few reasons. One, my friends were very privacy conscious and would often either not sign up or use a weird name (like some people do). This made it hard to find people. Two, the user experience sucked hard. Third, they had different domains for different subgroups (I remember one for school children and one for students).

Finally, if you went travelling to any other country (except Austria or Switzerland maybe), the rest of the world had Facebook. So to keep in touch, you also needed Facebook, which had a better user experience. Why bother with both?

It's a testament to the poor state of the art in user experience for early social networking sites that Facebook had a (relatively) "good" user experience. It has always been horrible, except relative to most of its competitors.

So, not luck. Despite all the down votes

This needs to be said more.

Culture is correlated with technology, i.e. certain technologies appeal to certain kinds of people.

You can go to any Ruby meetup and you will see it's different than PHP meetup which both are quite different from Functional Programming meetups.

Thus I would say that it's not about the technology but about people whom you attract (i.e. culture).

I skip luck & timing, these are mostly random and one has very little power to influence them.

All three of the above communities (PHP, Ruby, and FnProg) are diverse enough that a PHP meetup in location A could be culturally similar to an FnProg meetup in location B, and so on.

you could definitely argue that a company using PHP nowadays would find it harder to find good engineers because the best ones who care about quality, performance etc don't want to work on a PHP app

Ooh.

Mind, I agree with you, but given the Holy Documents Handed Down By Our Lord and Savior, Paul Graham, HN... might not be the safest place to say it.

Edit: so, I'm clearly getting a lot of downs on this... maybe sarcasm in reference to PG was going a bit too far. Oh well. I'm not deleting or editing any of it, because that's sort of dishonest.

Sarcasm in general pisses people off, doubt it's anything Paul graham specific

Sarcasm pisses people off, or delights them. Or both.

Your template is far less interesting than the original statement. PHP spent a pretty long time as basically the lingua franca outside the enterprise world (and even some places in it), and there are still domains where it holds that title (e.g. WordPress alone outweighs many languages' ecosystems), so the phenomenon the parent was describing applies more to PHP than to some arbitrary language you could insert into this template.

I actually agree with the original statement. PHP, for quite a few years now certainly has NOT been the language of choice for most startups, yet we still see the majority of them fail.

"and miss all of the tremendous losers who picked php and got nothing for it"

certainly applies equally across all languages in my opinion.

That's not what was being discussed, though.

The grandparent of your comment suggested that, yes, these projects were lifted up by PHP's un-fancy nature giving them focus. The parent of your comment was suggesting that, basically, the companies that have succeeded using PHP aren't any more numerous than we would expect to have come out of the massive PHP userbase even if PHP doesn't offer any advantages at all.

The observation that "PHP, for quite a few years now certainly has NOT been the language of choice for most startups, yet we still see the majority of them fail" seems to be responding to a nonexistent conversation in which people were positing that startups based on other languages don't fail. Nobody here is saying that other languages magically make your business succeed.

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