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Comment by iowai | Hacker News Reader

I once was an intern in a company that wanted to rewrite the whole Reddit code in .net. The founder was a charming person and managed to raise a huge pile of money. "We can redo this with current technology and elegant design! We will run circles around Reddit!".

We had a great time. Free snacks, lot's of parties, luxurious office furniture, skateboarding in the hall... In the end, the company ran out of money before the product reached a useful state.

Good times. It has been some time since then and I have a "normal" job now. Last thing I heard about the founder is that he started a new vc backed company destined to run circles around something.

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That’s odd. As if the programming language itself is what makes Reddit what it is :)

Unfortunately from my experience, people thinking that background technology choices can give them a consumer advantage is not that uncommon.

That or more hardware to overcome bottlenecks caused by bad code. "It's running slow, we need more memory!". After some investigation, really... you've got 8 joins without using keys, and you're getting paid more than us how?

FYI, that includes pg's thinking on the use of lisp for viaweb

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

>FYI, that includes pg's thinking on the use of lisp for viaweb

Yeah, I for one think this was equally flawed. People have made succesful and quickly iteratable web services/apps in all kinds of languages, including Perl and PHP.

Plus, one single data source like pg had is never that accurate, plus the fact he and Martin were already Lisp guru s helped them in their use of it.

Well, they're right pretty much by definition - otherwise it wouldn't matter at all what technology you use. You could code your CRUDs in Brainfuck connected to MongoDB. In real world, you gain consumer advantage by e.g. chosing right database for the problem, or playing to language's strengths (which is what pg done at Viaweb).

So true, while neglecting UI and usability. I guess developers hate that for people UI is your product.

Spend months rewriting the most beautiful backend and nobody care, redesign a button and everyone is excited.

I must have spent my entire time between 2004-2008 working for companies that did that sort of thing (rewrite to .Net). Plenty of cash to burn with no real possibility of success and no business plan.

In two cases, the guys running it knew it was going to fail from day one and their business model was to do this in two year chunks, syphon the cash out of the VCs after talking the product up, live the high life and disappear for a bit.

I felt no shame working for them back then but I do now.

Honestly the premise, the model and database matter a whole lot more than the language. The premise is the most important as how it's presented to everyone is determined by it. The model is only to help you get your head around it; users don't (and shouldn't have to) care what you do in the backend. The database will dictate what you choose to store and how often.

Even rubbish code, in any language, can survive for a lot longer by shifting the spotlight of scrutiny to the biggest bottleneck, the database. Which will also be the deciding factor in reducing growing pains.

He was obviously obsessed by .net and circles. But what do you mean by "circles around Reddit" or "circles around something"? Like... g+ circles?

It's a figure of speech. See how people use it:

http://news.gnod.com/search?f=run+circles+around

Thanks! It would be interesting to know what made this guy think that "elegant design" and using .net is the way to run circles around Reddit but...

To be fair, you can build a decent social site out of .net; e.g. Stack Overflow does quite well. But its not a main factor.

To be fair you can build a decent anything out of any language / framework / environment; the point is, technology doesn't matter that much if your product is good. Look at Twitter or something for example, they built a product in a language they were comfortable with, and evolved from there.

I totally agree with that.

User first, then technology

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