Startup: what you said

So it turns out that quite a few readers of this weblog use Bloglines. For some reason, Bloglines stopped sucking down the RSS feed for this weblog after March 19 until three days ago. Did other feed readers experience similar difficulties with my blog? I know Google Reader continued to work, as did the RSS screensaver on my Mac. Anyway, that partially explains why I had no feedback on my hypothetical question about startups.

Thanks to those who did end up responding. Here’s some snippets of what you said, along with some feedback I got via e-mail in no particular order:

1. My 2c – I don’t believe there’s that much inherent difference between the major web platforms – in my opinion you’re best off going with what you have the most experience with (and what the people you can get have experience with). You could probably lose 2-3 months learning a new platform (primarily learning it’s idioms and gotchas) and it’s not clear that you’re ever going to get that back. Having said that, I would tend to recommend against the embedded scripting languages (PHP, ASP, etc) on any project of significant size – it’s not so much that they can’t scale, but they strongly encourage non-scalable design by their nature (and it can be harder to find developers who understand the difference). A ‘well-designed’ PHP application will often actually include it’s own sub-templating language (e.g. Smarty), and treat PHP as a pure programming language.
2. Now you have the prototype you pretty much know the functionality – “recoding” is all about achieving the chrome and non-functional requirements. So, maybe Erlang – excellent for reliability/uptime (incl. for hot-upgrading and failover) and scalability – the two most important -ilities for webapps. Frontend “yaws”, plus some javascript library, and/or maybe an web framework like “erlyweb”Backend – hand-coded erlang apps. Database – “mnesia” or maybe “couchdb”
3. Thing is, there are big sites being run on all combinations of your options. If you just need *something*, write it in what you feel comfortable in, if it needs to scale later you can use your first iteration as a learning experience. Personally, I think you’d be crazy to write anything in java, you can’t be nimble in java. I also think php is a dead end, it’s just too bodgy. Python/Ruby is the only way to go imho. Funnily enough I saw no mention of javascript for your web 2.0 site :) I would suggest that none of the backend stuff matters at all, and that the only thing that matters is which javascript library you use in the front end.
4. I assume that this is for a “friend” :-). But I shouldn’t assume.I’m afraid to say I can’t add that much. Just don’t have the knowledge. For this kind of thing, being able to easily tinker with and evolve the system seems an important critiera, if just one of the relevant criteria.
5. it doesn’t matter what technology you use, because you’ll rewrite the whole thing several times anyway. pick what’s fastest to explore the idea and the market now. time to market, and reaction time once you’re there, cost far more than another 100 servers while you’re in the early stage.who are your partners (or your VC’s partners)? do they have an affinity with any particular technology? what are your friends best at? you’ll need a pool of expertise (and employees), so choose something to maximise that opportunity.
6. I was going to answer but my intial answer seemed too stupid and it was going to take too long to come up with an intelligent well thought out answer for a hypothetical that did require me to stretch my imagination to the extreme. It’s sort of like what I am finding with some of my 1st years. In one the subjects I am teaching they have to do a lot of hypothetical work and most of the time, the results are utter disasters because they simply, simply can’t stretch their brains into comprehending scenarios so outside their sphere of “being”. Since founding a startup is far, far outside my sphere of ‘being’ I decided I would much rather play pokemon. Now if you ever want to know which pokemon is best to use against a ground-type pokemon….

Mostly very useful feedback, and amusing otherwise. It’s interesting how similar most of the feedback was. Agility, ability to tinker and swiftness of development were common themes. For at least the alpha and beta, I think it would be best to go with tools/platforms where you can put something together fairly quickly, and make changes quickly if your users tell you they’re looking for something a bit different. I’m not sure Java fits that description (although I’ve always been a Java nut). There’s at least a compile step and possibly a deploy step, depending upon your development environment, between making a small change in the code and seeing the result in your browser. Ruby looks cool, but it is still lagging way behind the other serious contenders in terms of performance. PHP could be a contender, but if the system ever got really big and you had new graduates working on the application, I’d bet you’d soon end up with a mess, with business logic stuck in the presentation code and so forth – I really do agree with the first comment above on that point. So I’ve got to say that Python is looking good right now, despite its Makefile-like treatment of white space. Coupled with Django, it might be a winner. There’s also the fact that Google have provided a nice playpen for Python-based web applications.

Once again, thanks all for your input. Please keep the advice and opinions coming if you have more to add. It’s much appreciated.

—Update (06:49 19/04/2008): I’m not sure my comment about Ruby performance is entirely fair. The performance difference between Ruby and Python is nothing (Python is a few times faster on most tests) compared to the difference between Python/Ruby and Java, for example (where Java is one and sometimes several orders of magnitude faster). By this reasoning, if one is happy to sacrifice some runtime performance and use Python instead of Java, one presumably wouldn’t be too worried that Ruby is slightly worse than Python. And Ruby doesn’t do too badly in terms of memory usage. Besides, if one was really worried about performance, one would use C.