Poll: What languages are you using to build your startup?

24 points by jsjenkins168 ↗ HN
If you are actively working on a web startup, what technologies/languages are you currently developing with?

This is data I've been interested in capturing for a while now, and figured the new polls are a great chance to do so. Please only vote if you are actually using a particular tech for web development, not simply if you think it is cool or others do. This is mostly off the top of my head, if I missed anything significant just let me know.

36 comments

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Hecl, which is built with Java (not JSF or JSP) and Ruby.
C/C++ 5 points

Wow. I'm maintaining a math-heavy desktop app in C++ and it's killing me with its ponderousness. Who the eff is using C++ for web development?

I am very curious about the same thing. All I can guess is there are still hackers developing CGI based web services for their startups. But why...
It's possible that they're building stuff with either a desktop component (RescueTime, DropBox, PikLuk) or a heavy algorithmic component on the back-end (I don't know of any, but then, I wouldn't...) Very few successful startups are only web; most combine a web aspect with some sort of domain-specific processing or data collection, which can be in any language.

There's code written in C and Ocaml in my current startup, but I didn't write it, so I didn't tick it off in the poll. But I could easily see us moving into an area where we'd want to do some back-end processing in a faster language than Python.

Why did you assume web development? Sure, many people here build web sites, but don't forget that such startups still represent a relatively small fraction of total amount of software written.

I am involved in two startups and both use C++.

1. Video codecs (encoding/transocing) and IP video streaming. This is for my "day job" startup where we do IP video security.

2. Pikluk Browser (downloadable from pikluk.com) is written in C++ because that project requires a fairly low-level Win32 hacking.

And even our Rails web application uses external C-libraries for image manipulation.

"Please only vote if you are actually using a particular tech for web development"
"Who the eff is using C++ for web development?"

Google.

Ruby on Rails. It still amazes me that I can design, code, test and deploy even complex features in <= 1 day.
With all of the hate, Ruby's still on top!?

I'm using it because it makes me happy. Not surprisingly, that was Matz's goal.

Why are others?

Why bother hating a language that you never even use? That would be prejudice!

It takes a lot of training, practice, and experience to really hate a language thoroughly.

Could the same thing be said for people?
I'm using it because it's what our founder started with. I joined knowing this because it's higher-level than most languages in use, and we've got smart people and no bureaucracy. That doesn't mean I don't hate Ruby, but I do hate it a lot less than Java.

In fact, I can't think of any case where a project I worked on used a language that I thought was the best abstraction for the problem space. It was what the founder thought would work well, or what the company policy required (I wish I was kidding), or what had bindings to The Library we needed, or had a compiler on the desired platform, or whatever.

When I was job-hunting last, I found zero Lisp jobs in Seattle, and wasn't ready to start my own yet (and really don't want to move to Boston). Next time, I will be, and I'll probably use Lisp exclusively.

Maybe it's time for a "I wish we were using ..." follow-up survey.

Missing option, Java.
EDIT: Added. Can be a catch-all for other Java frameworks not utilizing JSP.
Various other web-frameworks?

Out of those three, only JSP is like a basic building-block for web stuff.

It might be better to name only "Java", which would then cover everything related.

Yeah youre probably right. I just wanted to separately measure JSF and GWT, but there's so many other frameworks its probably better to simply group them under "Java".
Many web services use servlets directly -- no JSP or other 'framework'.

Other web startups may use Java for internal roles other than 'serving pages'.

Still others may have an applet or desktop-Java component to their overall service.

There are many web frameworks in java that don't use JSPs. Wicket is a good one.
How about databases. Oracle, MySql, Microsoft Sql, PostgreSQL
I thought that might be a bit outside this domain since they are not used to serve or generate web pages. But still useful to know, if someone else wants to make a separate poll..
Tcl and C the tools of choice for the discriminating hacker!

git and gitk are made in Tcl and C, and git is nowadays considered to be the new linux, so thats my proof

and why is VBScript up there!

>why is VBScript up there!

If you're going to build in PHP, vbscript/ASP would be the MS equivalent. Interesting to note though that nobody is using the granddaddy of inline web scripting anymore...

IMO, if MS would have open-sourced ASP when PHP started to come out, they would have that market.

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git itself doesn't link against Tcl afaik. Still, though, it's a cool language that doesn't get enough love.
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http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxT7jIffmj3lGdXFcn9hK...

The data is highly weighted on certain languages, which is probably to be expected. I'm a bit surprised there are not more Arc, GWT, AIR, or Silverlight based projects going on yet though.

The bar lengths don't seem to match the numbers.
Ugh, looks like a Google Docs bug (wont invert the graph when you publish). Should be fixed now.
We are using GWT ... in particular GWT-Ext which stands on the shoulders of the Ext JS library. It is an amazing environment to develop in ... and the UI is slick.

The google folks have done a great job putting the core of GWT together. For me, it is the most interesting framework in the Java playground for front end development ... the productivity gain compared to traditional java web frameworks is working out really nicely for us.

Missing option: Smalltalk
Missing option - Assembly language. Okay, fine - I'm joking.
that's not going to give you a very good representation of language use in the wild. the HN crowd that responds is probably pretty skewed one way or another. good luck