This explains just about everything. Can’t remember all the times I’ve read some pompous HN comment “pah, I could build it” and then thought, “well, you’d be just 0.01% of the way there.”
Nothing kills this delusion more than spending a year building something that you can’t seem to successfully market... multiple times. Then you realize there’s almost zero value in the technical part, and you can only chuckle at HN comments arguing about Python vs Node as if that’s the crux of a new business.
> you can only chuckle at HN comments arguing about Python vs Node as if that’s the crux of a new business
I definitely relate to this. I use Go a fair amount, and any conversation about Go on /r/programming invites a whole bunch of "every product built on a language without generics is doomed to fail". While generics would be a nice feature to my mind, I like Go for the tooling and the ecosystem, which are still an insignificant contribution to the success of a commercial product, but still many times more significant than the type system (and I'm a fan of type systems too).
To add, we mostly use pre generics Java at work. The product was built around 2003-2005 and is very successful inside company. It is also most reliable among dozen on or so other enterprise project in our group. So this obsession with Generics or other language feature is by people who are less interested in product and its success.
Sadly developer productivity is a problem to have, only if you have a legit business case, which most startups don't have.
Truth is, Python or Node or Go doesn't matter. Your customer won't care if it takes some input and output something they expected. Technology is cheap.
Startups absolutely have time to market and cost of developer time. Using a language that can get you there in 1 month instead of 1 year is very important and has nothing to do with the cost of technology.
There's very little to no correlation between "difficulty to get adoption/sales" and "time to market". This very article is about displacing Amazon (founded in 1994) in the ecommerce space and the very top comment is about OpenBazaar (started in 2016). You can develop your business in golang or rust or f#, but if the business idea is irrelevant or unviable then your developer economic productivity is exactly zero.
I don't think either language I mentioned there could offer you 12 productivity against the rest. Yeah, people have preference, for sure, but if you can build something in a month time using Node, someone else could probably clone it with Python/PHP in a month time as well.
Whether you can sell your startups or not, is a completely different matter
It's worthless to everyone except a drowning man, to whom it's priceless.
Supply and demand are highly dependent on context. A strong technology base in a business is usually only required after you're starting to see scaling problems.
Nothing kills this delusion more than spending a year building something that you can’t seem to successfully market... multiple times. Then you realize there’s almost zero value in the technical part, and you can only chuckle at HN comments arguing about Python vs Node as if that’s the crux of a new business.