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What would that something be?

Most "mainstream" languages aren't any better.

Something with a large ecosystem and community that has ready-made solutions for tuning, deployment, and integration with other products and workflows. Java and JavaScript are front-runners. Python is good too.

If you have to build rather than buy all the infrastructure that's not your core product, you lose. That's a huge yak to shave, and startups can't -- and mature businesses won't -- absorb the upfront costs of doing all that work.

you misunderstand the meaning of startups. Startups, at core, are not about rebuilding the same stuff by combining existing solutions but about building novel solutions to solve yet unsolved problems. The other things are really secondary to that

Indeed. As a startup ypu want to build as little as possible tgat's already been built -- so you want the language/framework that has the biggest most accessible ecosystem, so that you can focus on building things unique to your line of business.

That's not unique to startup - I'd say it's even more relevant to regular "corporate" software development, no? What's unique to real startups (for my definition of "real": the ones that solve yet unsolved technically challenging problems) is: even though you may be better off using a good ready-made infrastructure, that doesn't change the game for you as your competitors also have access to it. While using a conceptually different (more powerful?) toolset might give you an edge over the competitors and a chance to indeed solve the problem you're after. Just yesterday I talked about this: https://www.slideshare.net/vseloved/lisp-in-a-startup-the-go...

"Java and JavaScript are front-runners."

Which is where Clojure comes in.

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