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Comment by paulie_a | Hacker News Reader

To be fair the technology stack is almost irrelevant when you are starting a company. write it in perl, python, rails, hell write it in old school cgi and use c++. It all comes down to how many sales did you make today. The clients will rarely care what language was used behind the scenes.

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That’s a pretty myopic way to look at it. Sure, use what you know and forget the branding of your technology, I agree. But you need to be cognizant of short term vs long term gains, gasoline you can pour on the fire (libraries and integrations), the team you are going to build, the deployment story, the ops story, etc...

I’ve seen companies that made poor technical decisions up front spend years paying for those mistakes. One could argue that those mistakes are what even put them in the position to where they could pay em down... but there is definitely a way to measure twice/cut once and save yourself from a world of hurt while still moving quickly and making sales.

My point was that the technology in a startup is nearly irrelevant if you don't have sales.

Step 1-1000 of building a startup is selling.

It's not an irrelevant choice. Your talent pool will look very different with each of the options you mention.

At a minimum you should be writing your first iteration of a product in something that's clear and easy to understand, if only so that the effort of translating it to something else when needed is less painful. Rails is a great candidate for that.

But even with that being said, prototypes and v1s have a nasty habit of continuing along far past their originally intended expiration date, and if your only criteria is what gets sales today with no regard for future maintainability, you're taking on a very significant debt that is going to be hard to repay when you do need your tech to be easy to work with and performant.

I refuse to write Perl. If enough people feel the same way, Perl is not a good choice.

Long term perhaps but short term it means increased salaries.

You're not wrong.

Or you are not the right choice to hire...

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