Startup Fever: Which language ?

I have never had my startup ... not at 22 , not many people except a few of my batch mates, have a startup at this age. Kudos to them and many more like them who do not want to be a peg in the corporate machinery but rather wont be different in their own way.

But some experience come in me in the form if co-ordinating for IMG in my college days. As a brief introduction IMG is Information Management Group which is responsible for management of a significant portion of IT resources of the institute. IMG is a student body , consisting roughly of around 40 students mostly taken through an elaborate process of interviews and tests and some others handpicked by giving them small intern projects.

There is in all a lot to reflect from the experiences of managing in a 40 member technical team, most of which can be (i guess) directly applied towards making a startup. I always wanted to cover this stuff here but due to a complete lack of blogging impulses it has always remained in me for almost more than an year now.

Lets not digress further and reach to the point straight away. To any new person starting to write a few bits of code (for oneself) the first question that comes is what language to write. Whenever I write code or asked people to write code for a project. I ask a few questions

Which language am I comfortable with ? Which language is the team comfortable with ? What is the size of code you want to write ? For how many users you want to write it ? What are your coding skills ? (More important) In what language you are most comfortable with debugging ? Most people are not very good code writers, but they need to know debugging pretty well, if you cant debug very well, you are bound to exceed time lines and screw up on big projects.

A good decision is always a mix of gut feeling, logic and a penchant for doing new stuff. If your gut says Java is good, a general survey tells you that people love it and you have a thing for trying out the "new framework" out there.

The problem: "Every language on this goddamn earth sucks to the core if you dont know how to ''exploit it''. " Let us say Java, I coded in java extensively, if you dont know wtf you want to do with it, the thousand s of techniques out there are sure to drive you crazy.

Here is how I decided what to do for a major project. I "knew" java sucks if u cant use it properly, key ?? the key is to understand the problem at hand and come with a design first. My problem had key features:
1. Scalability, the app was to be used by 1000s of users.
2. Familiarity for my team, everyone knew java well.
3. Maintainability for the group, can t use ASP .NET coz nobody is really interested in learning that. Everyone loves java for some strange unknown reason.
4. My penchant for the newly learned Java EE 5 and JDK 5 features !!! My personal choice goverened a few things incidently ;).
5. An elaborate mix of potentially screwing problems that a framework will take loads of code to write and a bad experience with existing frameworks.


Never write code first and than design later !!! unless you want to throw that code write out of the window or are cool with being bankrupt.

We decided to do a high level prototype of all the challenges that we could have faced and than scrapped all that code , just took a month of our time. Than redesigned the application from scratch, included all the features we wanted to and wrote all the code from scratch (no framework BS) and ran it, believe me it rocks !!

Due to our apparent lack of experience we screwed a bit at some places, but hey as far as it runs, it runs fast, is secure and damn easy to maintain ... it suffices all the requirements of a good s/w project ?? (yes it is scalable across layers and compatible across platforms, is standard compliant, has visible design patterns and blah blah blah ).

In conclusion ... the above fundas worked for me, hope they work for you :)