> being able to implement things 10x more quickly than your competitors is a sustainable competitive advantage.
The only way you are going to get 10x, with roughly equivalent people is if someone is using a wholly inappropriate language (Ruby vs Forth for web apps, say), or if you can avoid writing libraries because someone has already written them.
This is one of the positive network externalities involved in programming language economics: the more people involved, the more likely it is someone has already written the code you need. Of course, these effects are not so strong that everyone gravitates to only a few languages, but they are certainly a consideration.
By writing your own language, unless it makes it very easy to take advantage of some other language (the JVM languages are a good example), you are pretty much guaranteeing that you will have to do this work yourself.
The only way you are going to get 10x, with roughly equivalent people is if someone is using a wholly inappropriate language (Ruby vs Forth for web apps, say), or if you can avoid writing libraries because someone has already written them.
Or if your competitors are using the standard languages and tools, and you're using a language that provides significant abstractions on top of the standard languages and tools.
I was on board with your comments until I watched the video. Their language looks to be a jump on the order of assembly to C.
You're effectively arguing that all languages/frameworks are equal within an order of magnitude. I think this has been demonstrated false time and time again, and you even demonstrate it again in your own post (saying Forth is unacceptable for web development).
I'm arguing that languages that are currently used and honed for this type of programming are going to be difficult to beat by an order of magnitude. I said that you could lose a lot by using something that's just plain wrong. In other words, it's very difficult to go faster than Lance Armstrong on a bike, but pretty easy to go a lot slower.
Perhaps there is some room for radically new implementations; something along the lines of Erlang, which makes it possible to do what is quite difficult with other languages.
I think there is more room in frameworks for existing languages, but still, an order of magnitude seems quite dubious to me.
I'm actually not at all negative about new languages (I hack on a simple one myself), startups just don't strike me as the place for them. What they're doing does look cool, but what happens when you need to process an image, or send email, or talk to a different database, or deal with any of the other various things that are often covered by language extensions? Maybe this would have been better as a hack/framework on top of Javascript.
It seems to me that the core concept here is the declarative nature of the framework, and the logic that ties things together that comes from the compiler. On one side, it has to spit out Javascript, so perhaps it would have made sense just to do the whole thing as a hack/extension/whatever to Javascript?
I guess without actually seeing the code behind it, it's difficult to really say with certainty.
Where has this order of magnitude difference been "proved"? I would say that even developing in forth is not one order of magnitude slower than ruby, as long as reasonable libraries are available.
Every single day when we don't program in COBOL. I'm at a bit of a loss, have you never switched to a more productive language and cringed when you went back to the old language?
> have you never switched to a more productive language and cringed when you went back to the old language.
Yes, but the difference is not one order of magnitude. Not if there is some level of sanity in the language (e.g., I am not talking about brainfk). For example, even though one can program faster in Python, it is not 10 times faster than in C, especially for large-scale software.
You know, I was going to point out how amazingly brain dead that comparison was, and how inappropriate it was to try to guess my skill level in various languages based on my claim that a language that requires 1/20 the LOC is 50x faster.
I will however finish with, there's a reason C applications don't have features or agile development cycles, and it's not because the coders are absurdly productive. Also, please don't ever try to be a manager.
The only way you are going to get 10x, with roughly equivalent people is if someone is using a wholly inappropriate language (Ruby vs Forth for web apps, say), or if you can avoid writing libraries because someone has already written them.
This is one of the positive network externalities involved in programming language economics: the more people involved, the more likely it is someone has already written the code you need. Of course, these effects are not so strong that everyone gravitates to only a few languages, but they are certainly a consideration.
By writing your own language, unless it makes it very easy to take advantage of some other language (the JVM languages are a good example), you are pretty much guaranteeing that you will have to do this work yourself.