[steveklabnik]

For every widely used technology, someone had to be the first. And then some small group had to be the early adopters.

[zitterbewegung]

If you are a startup it’s best to focus on the product and not necessarily the implementation

Groupon was prototyped in Wordpress.

[spooneybarger]

Wallaroo started as a company that was building high-performance data processing infrastructure for real-time trading and adjacent systems. Wordpress wouldn't really cut it.

[steveklabnik]

For some startups, that makes sense, yes. For other startups, it may not. See pg's classic essay (that I'm not 100% sure I agree with, but, we're on hacker news) for one example of why you may want to use a more niche langauge: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Ruby on Rails was created for Basecamp.

[Zababa]

And Rails was extracted from Basecamp. I think startups depend so much on the few firsts individuals that it's hard to have a hard rule about what to use.

[cortesoft]

Sure, but what is the advantage of being first to a new language? I’d rather be the 50th than the first.