Comment by shingen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shingen | Hacker News Reader

These debates are always silly at best, and painfully indicative at worst.

Indicative of what exactly? A certain type of nerd (emphasis that I mean a sub group) that is likely to never accumulate wealth or create anything particularly successful on their own because they're too anal-retentive to understand that success in building a Web app or business is not defined by whether you use PHP or Ruby or Python or even ColdFusion.

Unless you think you're the next Facebook or Tumblr, then extreme optimization is necessary. Otherwise, the rest of the discussion is bullshit stacked on top of bullshit.

If the common wisdom were followed, Plenty of Fish should have never existed, given their infrastructure and development approach. And Stack Exchange should have never existed with their 'lame' Win stack (popular opinion of the Windows development environment among a certain class of developers =) ).

There are a lot of ways to 'skin a cat'. The only thing that matters is whether you can get to the finish line, build something people want to use, and perhaps monetize it so you can keep putting resources into making it better. Who gives a shit what you use to get there, just so long as you get there.

> The only thing that matters is whether you can get to the finish line, build something people want to use, and perhaps monetize it so you can keep putting resources into making it better.

Bingo. Everything else is just navel-gazing.

Except there is no finish line. I currently work on an application that is 10 years old, where's the finish line? Its not done in PHP, anyways it has parts that were done very sloppily and "against the grain" and the organization is still paying for it with a higher cost of maintenance.

But did it bring the organization more revenue? In the past I've done some things in PHP that were horrible hacks but did help the whole company forward. Doing them right in the existing code base would mean rewriting a lot. Especially one of those hacks has gotten it's revenge on me when making it more flexible later, but in the meantime it did bring us substantial rewards.

To this day i'm still not sure what would be better: telling my boss "sorry, but if we want feature y, it will take 2 months (but it will we done right)" or "yes we can do that in 2 days but don't expect the code to be pretty"

All code is an exercise in living with imperfection. The trick is finding the sweet spots in the scale of imperfection vs. time, which aren't linearly correlated (eg. you can spend a lot of time gold-plating something and make only small gains in reducing imperfection, while on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes investing a little bit of extra time can yield large gains in reducing imperfection).

I'm sure some programming book somewhere has said that in a much more elegant fashion.

Maybe at the time but I'm sure they have cost thousands of dollars in dev hours later on that evened it out

There absolutely is a finish line: as in, launch the product.

In fact, there are countless finish lines in business and product development. You're constantly running a new race every development cycle. Trends change, competitors change, the entire landscape can change. Sometimes you're going to find yourself flat footed, and you're going to have to start a whole new race to launch a radically altered product.

It'd be like saying there was no finish line for the iPhone version 1. Of course there was, they had to actually ship it. And every product iteration has a new race to run and a finish line to meet to put the product on a shelf somewhere to be purchased. The same is true with iterating software of any sort, whether you're talking a micro level finish line (adding a feature to Gmail or Firefox 10.1), or a macro level finish line (shipping a completely revamped Firefox version or launching a radically new email concept with GMail beta). Getting from point A (inspiration, idea, task) to point Z (task completed) = finish line.

Try never having a finish line on any task, product, business, etc, and see what happens.

my point was that there is a maintenance stage that extends well beyond the 'finish line' of a dev cycle especially for a web app

What a pleasant attitude painfully indicative of a certain kind of entrepreneur that can only see green in the world.

You see, what you call a "certain type of nerd" are actually craftsmen who enjoy things done well. You can be all the IKEA you want, and you're surely gonna rack up some interesting profits. But if I'm the kind of furniture maker who enjoys taking 6 months to build the perfect cabinet, you can be sure I'll pay special attention to selecting tools that I love. And none of your monetization arguments are going to count really.

So the bottom line is that PHP vs Ruby vs Python etc is a craftsmen's discussion. (If it's a serious discussion at all, that is - comparing it to Lean Startups isn't a serious discussion.) Bringing arguments like yours to such a setting just makes you look silly (especially when you think it's about "extreme optimization", then you just look like you really have no idea what you're talking about).

It's not a craftsmen's discussion. A craftsman picks the tools they feel the most comfortable with to get the job done.

Sure, craftsmen like to discuss their tools, but as an open exchange about their experiences in order to learn from it, or maybe even simply out of professional curiosity.

The whole "my stack is better than your stack", and the "PHP sucks" thing that is commonplace on HN, proggit and other forums is not a craftsmen's discussion. It's a juvenile playground pissing contest that has nothing to do with craftsmanship.

By the way, anybody who thinks that real crafsmen typically use the "best" tools available has never seen neither an artist nor a plumber at work.

<blink>By the way, anybody who thinks that real craftsmen typically use the "best" tools available has never seen neither an artist nor a plumber at work.</blink>

Should go on top of proggit/hn (yes, including blinking tags :).

By the way, anybody who thinks that real crafsmen typically use the "best" tools available has never seen neither an artist nor a plumber at work.

You are correct that they do not pick the "best" tools, but they will deliberately choose the best tools for the job, as opposed to the most convenient tools to aquire and learn.

"It's a juvenile playground pissing contest that has nothing to do with craftsmanship." Sadly, you've got me there. There's rich conversation to be had on the topic though, could we come up with ways to make that surface out of the current swamp of language debates?

Although they might not use them, they'll talk endlessly about them. I mention in another comment how I've witnessed very long discussions among my photography and cinema friends about the "nerdy" details of their work. But you're right, there's a lot less emotion than in our community :/

You can be all the IKEA you want....selecting tools that I love

Beautiful analogy, expect that it doesn't work here. You could be a craftsman and build an extremely solid and well designed backend. In the end consumers cannot appreciate your backend. A good example is I have no freaking clue what HN is built on. PHP? LISP? RUBBY?

HN is built on a handrolled Lisp dialect created on a lark by a millionaire PhD who was looking to test out his own PL design theories.

LOL. A broke craftsman ain't no craftsman, he's just an unemployed dude posturing as the real deal. I know plenty of real craftsmen, and none of them waste time bickering on the 'right' shape of chisel or optimal mix of cement and sand, they all judge their peers on the results they produce.

  they all judge their peers on the results they produce.

There's a little bit of a mismatch here:

* Posters above are arguing that the end result that programmers are judged upon is revenue. * You're arguing that the end result that craftsmen are judged upon is quality.

If a plumber is doing a terrible job but is doing well business-wise, I'd expect other plumbers to not look upon them so favourably

I really don't think the issue is judging something based on revenue at all.

There are numerous ways to measure the success of a product. It depends on what it is meant to accomplish.

The real point is: it does not matter what tools you use, so long as you are able to reach success (in any number of ways a person may choose to define it).

You can obviously argue about which tools will best get you there, or give you the best chance to succeed.

I've seen plenty of entrepreneurs or developers, use a tool 85% good enough, to hit a homerun. It's little different than a good plan executed today being better than a perfect plan tomorrow. I believe there are exceptionally few cases in life or business where the '85% good enough' won't do the job. I've yet to see the 100% perfection set actually exist anyway.

It's true that the ultimate judgement comes on the result, but a lot of the arguments around tools have an element of "this allows you to give better results". I've witnessed very long discussions with my photography and cinema friends about the varieties of cameras and other tools they like to use, so I doubt the validity of your statement. I do have to agree that it sounds a lot more intelligent and a lot less like the language bickering we're seeing.

The reason for that brings me back to my original point that there are too many people jumping in the language debates who really have no business being there. It's the equivalent of me trolling my photography friends saying that Sony makes amazing cameras because when I go on vacation I can just whip one out and take a decent shot, whereas the girl who didn't have her 4000$ SLR with her totally missed out on the opportunity. While 100% true, I'm really just derailing their conversation on the relative benefits of their cameras with something completely besides the point.

I didn't say anything about it being bad to enjoy your craft or what tools you use.

I've been dirt poor. Painfully, not actually scratching by, live off of ketchup packets poor. Let's talk about only seeing green some time eh. No matter the cost, I've always chose to do what I loved, and I've paid a helluva price for it at times. I've been an entrepreneur since I was 15. I know a thing or two about the extreme ends of both success and failure.

What I'm saying is: get the job done, whatever it takes. Use whatever tool will accomplish the job for you personally. Don't waste time turning yourself inside out over pedantic debates over 5% efficiencies, while opportunity escapes out the back door.

I've been an entrepreneur since I was 15.

I wish we could kill the "entrepreneur" meme.

What you did since you were 15 was try (unsuccessfully from what I read) to launch some money making scheme or company.

I wish you had any clue what an entrepreneur actually is. A money making scheme? That's laughable. Spoken like someone that is definitely not an entrepreneur and will never be.

I've been quite successful, thanks. =) Currently I'm sitting on a seven figure net worth, and I'm in my early 30's. How about you? I've also failed plenty, like anybody that has ever attempted anything difficult.

What I've done since I was 15 is build and create web applications that I thought were useful or that I wanted to see exist. Some of them I hoped would become successful businesses, some of them I created for the hell of it. Out of six web businesses I've started, three of those businesses have been successful and both paid for themselves and paid me a healthy income.

I built what is, per Quantcast, likely the world's #1200x largest web site, starting from $50 on a terrible virtual server, using nothing but an 8 year computer, notepad, and a 12 year old FTP program, on a very slow Verizon DSL line. Gee, if only I had used the right tools, lol!

I just closed an investment round with one of the most successful business people on the planet. Unsuccessful indeed eh. As the agreements I've signed permit it, I'll come back here and update on the progress of my new enterprise. We can compare notes, and see how wildly successful you are too.

I wish you had any clue what an entrepreneur actually is. A money making scheme? That's laughable. Spoken like someone that is definitely not an entrepreneur and will never be.

Actually I've started my first company while in university, back in 1999. I sold my share in 2003. The company is still going strong today, and has around 30 employees nowadays (which might not sound much, but I'm from an entirely different country/IT environment). I also work for a startup the last two years, although not as a founder. I'm in my early 30s too, thanks for asking.

The whole "entrepreneur" thing, from the very word "entrepreneur", I find pretentious and silly, sort of like the "hipsterism" of the programming world. Oh, I did this and that, ramen, bla, MVP, bla, Rails, bla, exit, bla, VC round, bla, etc. Just build the thing, and STFU.

I admire people building things, from Steve Jobs to Bill Joy, who didn't run around selling the entrepreneur vibe.

Which, as I see it, is a rather recent fad, maybe a decade old at least in this particular form.

Except you called it "bullshit stacked on bullshit". Debates over languages go much deeper than "5% efficiencies", and what I was trying to get at is that depth is beyond an entrepreneur. Not because of an implied hierarchy, but because you have other concerns in life than learning about the intricacies of computer science. It takes real computer scientists and engineers (i.e. the craftsmen) to understand why it's so bad PHP didn't have first-class functions until whatever version.

For you, as an entrepreneur whipping out MVP after MVP until you strike gold, that couldn't matter less, but for those interested it's a big deal. To jump in the middle of their discussion as an uneducated outsider and judge the whole thing as "bs stacked on bs" is... inconsiderate at best.

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