has there ever been a project that became popular and/or successful because of its programming language? does it really matter to the end user what language it's in if it works well?
Your criticism makes more sense with products targeting non-technical users though. But IMO tech choices have cascading effects. I won’t buy a vehicle if the infotainment software sucks, and that’s the 2nd largest purchase I’ll ever make.
But to elaborate, they’ve found a niche simply by using Rust and rendering the GUI in a performant way on the GPU. I’m not saying performance is the only thing, but for a chunk of people it is something they care about.
If I had the optional GPS screen from 22yr ago, I think I would have ripped it out and replaced it a bunch of times or just bought a new car.
I’m curious to try the new iDrive 10. We will see…
On the other hand, I've found that core decisions like language ecosystem choice can be a good leading indicator of other seemingly unrelated decisions.
When I see someone choose a tool that I think is extremely well suited for a purpose, it makes me curious to see what else we agree on.
The Oven team, the ones who created the Bun runtime, is a good example for me. I think Zig is probably the best compromise out there right now, for my sensibilities. The Oven folks, who chose to use Zig to implement Bun, _also_ made a lot of product decisions I really agree with.
Come on, they advertise with benchmarks hence it's quite obvious why they didn't chose a gc'd language.
Yes it matters to me as an end user if my web browser is more or less likely to have vulnerabilities in it. Choice of programming language has an impact on that. It doesn't have to be Rust, I'd use a browser written in Pony.
If I were making something that had to be low-level and not have security bugs, my statement would be:
> I’m not smart enough to build a big multi-threaded project in a manual memory-managed language that doesn't have vulnerabilities. I want help from the language & compiler.
The size and longevity of the team matters a lot too. The larger it gets the more problematic it is to keep the bugs out.
If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck?
Because if you're getting lunch, and someone suggests Burgers, Sushi, or Casu martzu. Only two are actually reasonable.
Yes, yes, if I'm allergic to shellfish, I might want to make sure I have an EpiPen before getting sushi. But that doesn't mean it's a meaningful problem.
This doesn't guarantee any sort of commercial success because there are so many follow on things that are important (product/market fit, sales, customer success, etc.) but it's pretty rough to succeed in the follow ons when the product itself is shit.
For first order effects, if a product's target market is developer oriented, then marketing to things developers care about such as a programming language will help initial adoption. It can also help the tool get talked about more organically via user blogs, social media, word of mouth, etc.
Basically, yeah, it matters, but as a cog in a big machine like all things.
^https://xcancel.com/QULuseslignux/status/1918296149724692968
Of course, it's all just 1s and 0s at the end of the day. You can ultimately accomplish the same in any language. But the design of the language does shape the way developers end up thinking about the problems. If NeXT had used, say, C++ instead, it is unlikely that the people involved would have ever come to recognize the same possibilities.
Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator, the company that hosts Hacker News.
I think end users don't give a shit about the tech stack of a software. Why would they?
Typo?