There's a funny story about when cofounder Dustin Moskovitz first wanted to help on the site. Choice of language was obviously not such a big deal to them.
>Dustin was like, 'Hey, I want to help out. I want to help you do the expansion.'
>Zuckerberg told Moskovitz, "That's pretty cool. But you don't know any PHP."
>"That weekend he went home, bought the book 'PERL for Dummies,' came back, and was like, 'OK, I'm ready to go,'" Zuck said, and told him, "The site's written in PHP, not PERL, dude."
What if my definition of "power" is "the ability to write interrupt service routines and OS trap handlers"? That is, there are definitions of "power" where assembly is in fact the most powerful language out there. It all depends on what problem you're trying to solve.
This is base rate neglect: the percentage of people who are using elite tier languages (LISP, etc) are tiny in comparison to the number of people slinging Ruby/Python/etc. All that needs to be shown is that, per capita, LISP users tend to do better. Unfortunately, I don't have such data at my fingertips :)
The percentage of people who are competent enough (or crazy enough) to know a LISP well enough to build a product out of it AND be interested in a startup AND applying to YC is quite small in comparison to the number of people slinging code in the more popular languages (who are also interested in applying to YC).
Of course YC is funding companies that don't use i.e. LISP/Haskell/whatever is cool. If it only limited itself to the elite/hipster programmer startups (heh), it wouldn't have that many companies to invest in per year.
I know this comment wasn't addressed to me, but that's why my original question was phrased as: Are Lisp startups more successful, not: Are there more Lisp startups?
I can only speak from anecdotal memory, but I'm pretty sure Wit.AI primarily used clojure (arguably one of the most expressive lisps of all time) to go from 0 to acquisition in 18(!) months for what was essentially a pure software product.
Does anybody know of any good articles that discuss the actual performance merits of using npm addons? Aside from raw computation heavy functions (whereby dropping down to C++ would seem to be a good idea a priori), are there are other scenarios where using npm addons is a good idea in the node context?
For example, one thing I have found is that nodejs seems to be horrendously very slow at file system manipulation. Dropping down to a C++ addon thus might be a good idea if you're making a nodejs app that has a lot of file system manipulation involved.
Swig is amazing at quickly converting simple functions (i.e., functions that return an int and other simple types). But if you want to make a C++ function that returns an array or something like a JS object, SWIG doesn't seem to be able to automatically convert it into its javascript equivalent (AFAIK -- could be wrong here).
This is eerily timely (recently have been dealing with npm addons). Glad to see a good article about this, and am looking forward to the author's ebook.
