Ask HN: Which programming language is the right one for your startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which programming language is the right one for your startup?

2 pointschrisherd5 comments

If you were starting up and had to acquire the requisite technical skills to enable the implementation of your idea, how would you choose the right language which will enable you to realise your ambitions?

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Like @jetti, I would (and have) gone with what I already know. In my case, Groovy and Java. There are other languages I'm intrigued by, but I haven't seen enough evidence to convince me that any new language is going to offer such radical improvement in (performance|productivity|stability|whatever) as to justify the huge time sink it would be to switch.

That said, we try to make things API driven as much as possible (I'm loath to use the term "microservices", but I guess it would fit) so we have the option to introduce new languages on a piecemeal basis if/when it seems justified.

Some languages I've played with / looked at (or used in the past) that might make it into the mix someday include C++, Scala, Clojure, R, Python, Prolog and Julia... possibly others as well. But we're not going to start throwing new stuff in just because it's new and trendy. We try to avoid FDD (Fad Driven Development).

I would (and have) picked the language I already had a deep knowledge of: C#. Other than that, I would pick something that seemed to fit the need of what I'm doing. I'm thinking of creating a licensing as a service product which I would use Elixir/Phoenix because I've heard good things about the performance and I could have many calls coming in.

Unlike @jetti and @mindcrime, I would use the opportunity of a green fields project to switch to and learn a more suitable industry-accepted language such as Python instead of a declining language that I happen to know better like the ageing Apache Groovy, which was originally optimized for scripting but badly retrofitted with static typing and for building systems, which other languages built from the ground up for such stuff are markedly better at, such as Java, Scala, and Kotlin on the JVM at least.

I've been using Groovy for about a year now. Can you explain what you mean about the static system being "badly retrofitted?"

You have a script set up to ping you anytime someone mentions Groovy, don't you? :-)

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