[greenhouse_gas]

I've got another heresy coming up:

Outside of very specific fields, language doesn't matter.

I was quite strongly attacked on another thread for implying that WhatsApp is just another CRUD app.

The thing was that I wasn't bashing their dev team. They could have done a crazy amazing job, and it helped their company take off, but what was their secret sauce?

The ability to have an (almost) free SMS/MMS app which worked the same across all devices and worked with numbers rather than names/userid's, followed by network affects.

They could have written it in PHP and have it take off. And a competitor could have written it Haskell and had it fail.

(FB is written in PHP, MySpace was written in CF, Friendster was written in jsp, so logically PHP > CF > Friendster. Therefore, PHP > Java. QED?)

Twitter didn't fail because it was written in Ruby. It failed because of business.

Diaspora isn't FB not because of tech, but because of business.

[rpeden]

I don't think you deserve to be attacked for implying that about WhatsApp. You're right, in that the truth is that in the vast majority of cases for the vast majority of cases, programming language doesn't matter all that much.

Perhaps people disagreed with you because it seems to me that WhatsApp is an outlier where a specific language and runtime (Erlang & OTP) provided a clear advantage in a specific domain (realtime networked messaging). In this specific instance, the language provided facilities that made it easier to solve a specific type of problem than it would have been in other languages. It helped them get to market more quickly, and in that way could have directly contributed to the application's chance of success. I suppose what I'm getting at is that I think there's a decent case to be made that WhatsApp is one of those very specific instances you mentioned where the language is part of the company's secret sauce.

That's still no reason for anyone to attack you, though! It's easy enough to disagree in a friendly way. :)

[Daishiman]

The problem is that WhatsApp really isn't just another CRUD app and it's very unlikely that you could pull off an engineering feat of that scale with a different technology. It is the exact counterexample of what you say.

[greenhouse_gas]

The thing is that it is a CRUD app. You send it data (text, images or video) and get back data (text, images or video).

That's it.

It's not that different from Facebook.

Now, to get it to scale it may pay to use a high-reliability language. To make it secure you may not want to write it in C. But it would have taken off the same had it been written in Perl, PHP, Lisp, C, Assembly or Erlang.

Maybe it would have needed more hardware.

Maybe it would have crashed a few times.

But it would have taken off nonetheless.

[iopq]

It's literally an XMPP server that doesn't connect to other XMPP servers. I downloaded it and I was very disappointed. It literally does nothing else.