This is not just a theoretical question. Software is a very
competitive business, prone to natural monopolies. A company that
gets software written faster and better will, all other things
being equal, put its competitors out of business. And when you're
starting a startup, you feel this very keenly. Startups tend to
be an all or nothing proposition. You either get rich, or you get
nothing. In a startup, if you bet on the wrong technology, your
competitors will crush you.
What were the results of this experiment? Somewhat surprisingly,
it worked. We eventually had many competitors, on the order of
twenty to thirty of them, but none of their software could compete
with ours. We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the
server and yet felt like a desktop application. Our competitors
had cgi scripts. And we were always far ahead of them in features.
Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce
features that we didn't have. But with Lisp our development cycle
was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within
a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By
the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling
us, we would have the new feature too.
The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course.
If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should
expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance
means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups
is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup,
you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.
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.

2Expand

Technoblog » Ruby vs. Java: A matter of taste

Tags: java, ruby on 2006-03-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromtech.rufy.com

1 - 18 of 18

List 20 50 100

Notation: * = Private bookmark and comment|… = Clipping [?] | … = Public highlight [?]

Wade Ren's Related Tags

Selected tags

ruby

Related tags

See More Top Contributors

isaac Mao Toshiro Shimura lei zhou Maggie Tsai Ken Wei

Related Groups on Diigo

Coders

Members (115)

bookmarks (943)
Ruby on Rails

Members (44)

bookmarks (162)

Wade Ren's Bookmarks tagged ruby → View Popular

Beast

What is Beast?

Ruby Conference in Silicon Valley

Ruby on Rails Session Container Performance

Ruby: HomePage

Ruby and Ruby on Rails Book Roundup

The adventures of scaling, Stage 1

Evaluation: moving from Java to Ruby on Rails for the CenterNet rewrite

RubyForge: Help Wanted System

RadRails - A Ruby on Rails IDE

Dee Zsombor's blog: How to build an AJAX-ed spellchecker with Ruby On Rails

Relevance » Blog Archive » Some Numbers at Last

Joel on Software - What's all the fuss about Ruby On Rails?

techno.blog("Dion"): Drinking the Ribena rather than Koolaid

It's boring to scale with Ruby on Rails (Loud Thinking)

Ruby on Rails

SwitchTower: Automating Application Deployment |

Beating the Averages

Technoblog » Ruby vs. Java: A matter of taste

Wade Ren's Related Tags

See More Top Contributors

Related Groups on Diigo

Diigo - Highlight and Share the Web!