StartupRootsSG talk

[Sau Sheong Chang]

Guys, I'll be doing my bit for Ruby in a StartupRootsSG on the 4 July.

http://whichlanguageforyourstartup.eventbrite.com/

Do drop in if you are around and free!

[Keng Onn]

Same here +1 :)

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Shreyas Kulkarni <shryku...@gmail.com> wrote:

+1!

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[Sau Sheong Chang]

To honest I normally don't like to compare languages and platforms -- to me it's like asking which is better -- the hammer or the screwdriver. But I get that the event is really for people who has not much knowledge of all 3 languages to get a better understanding of each one of them.

On Monday, 18 June 2012 11:24:17 UTC+8, Sau Sheong Chang wrote:

[Jeffrey 'jf' Lim]

and this should be the best way to describe and see things, actually. We dont have a silver bullet language or platform yet (or "never")!

-jf

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[Jeff Dickey]

I definitely agree with the "comparing languages/platforms is like…" bit. It's just that sort of information-free religious war, particularly in various online groups (*cough*LinkedIn PHPDevelopers*cough*) that turned me off PHP after well over a decade.

Languages are important, and different languages solve different problems in different ways, encouraging and supporting different ways of looking at a problem. Just because you can write a payroll system in APL or Forth doesn't make those languages ideal candidates for the system. Having maintained a rather extensive statistical-analysis package written in COBOL, I have experience whereof I speak. :-P

But more important than the language or the platform is the community that grows up around a system; good communities tend to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of their system of interest. One thing that has impressed me about both the Ruby and Python communities (as opposed to, say, PHP) is the respect that people have for each other and for their code. If I need a question answered, I know some good places to go. (Just not on Freenode.) My historical odds of getting bad Ruby advice are about on par with the odds of getting good PHP (or C, or…) advice; the communities just don't work that way.

I might be going to the talk… if I do, I hope to hear the human/social aspects of the different language platforms being addressed, along with the obligatory feature-comparison PowerPoints.

Regards,

Jeff Dickey         Chief Engineer, Prolog
Gmail:              dicke...@gmail.com
Email:              jeff....@theprolog.com
Phone/SMS:          +65 8333 4403

[Paul Gallagher]

Totally agree Jeff. The success or failure of my startup is not going to hang on whether whitespace is significant or how many semi-colons I use.

I think you could actually go broader than community and say it's the entire language ecosystem that matters, and a comparison at that level I do think surfaces differences that have significant mission enabling/threatening consequences for technology-based startups. (by "ecosystem" I mean everything from skills availability to breadth and maturity of hosting options, vibrancy of a supporting component marketplace [paid or open source], maturity of development practices in the community [testing, agile etc] and so on)

Knowing the presenters, I'm pretty sure this is where the discussions will head.

In fact, I suspect there may be a subtext at work:

When founders ask:
"Which language is right for your startup? PHP, Python or Ruby?"
(as non- or semi-technical founders are wont to do),
They will discover (hopefully sooner than later) that the answer is:
"I'm sorry, Dave. That's not a question with a generally applicable and useful answer."

"Architectural Analysis" is one of the formal methods that the technical side of the house can go through to fill in details/make choices (like - eventually - which language), but there are many other questions that come before that can totally flip the language question e.g. does our startup idea best fit a "mobile first" strategy? Are we SaaS or do we ship bits?

Cheers,
Paul