Skip to main content

Does the language really matter?

Just read this post from JRuby god Ola Bini which pointed to an older article by Paul Graham. Eloquently as ever, Paul explains his views that more clever guys use superior technology and therefore are likely to succeed in business (i.e. be more successful than the competition).

During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.


I agree with his conclusion that more clever guys will be more flexible in choosing their tools. But is it really true that this translates into business success? If so, how can it be that MySpace succeeded although it was (originally) built on ColdFusion (in 2003 I believe). How can it be that Facebook is rumored to be sold at 10 billion dollars while being built on PHP (I do not mean to diss PHP, but it is hardly a technology known for its extravagant cleverness)? Regarding the ColdFusion example above I read that MySpace chose this technology because they simply had a development team that happened to know it well (and thus was efficient enough at cranking out the code).

My take on this question is that the chosen technology just has to fit sufficiently well to the problem. If that is given the team that is more proficient in their technology will have the advantage.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan...
15 comments
Read more

What is Multi-Tenancy? A closer look

Lately, I had a lot of conversations about multi-tenancy (MT). So I finally wrote up my thoughts on that term. In this post I will argue that MT is a value that depends on a continuous variable. Therefore, any statement about a system being “MT” can only be made in the context of the given requirements. It is not a property of the system itself . I will also show that perfect multi-tenancy is indistinguishable from single-tenancy (ST). MT is a value that depends on a continuous variable Imagine a step-function "ST-MT" (values are either 0 or 1) that determines if a given system is MT (1) or ST (0). That function will look like this: ST-MT = function (system, business requirements) Look at  the function’s arguments: the first one is obvious – the result will depend on the system itself. The second one is more interesting: it is the cumulative set of business requirements . Typically, these requirements will include: Resource sharing: systems typically declare...
2 comments
Read more

CMS vendors now and then

CMS analyst Janus Boye has just published a post on CMS vendors that discontinue their products (because they get bought out or similar) During the past 10 years, a number of software products used by online professionals have been discontinued That sentence reminded me that I had given a talk almost 10 years ago (it was in 2001 exactly) that contained a slide on the CMS market at that time: The circles denote vendors that were part of CMS market overview articles by popular German IT magazines in that year (I wanted to show how differently the market place could be perceived). A vendor placed in any of the circles had enough attention to be part of at least one evaluation. The vendors outside of the circles were not part of any of these overview articles, but somehow present in the market place - at least I knew their names back then. It is interesting to look at the landscape from that time. Of course there are a number of well-known vendors that got bought (Vignette, Obtree, Gauss...
2 comments
Read more