has there ever been a project that became popular and/or successful because of its programming language? does it really matter to the end user what language it's in if it works well?

The language tends to affect everything, but to give a quick Developer example there’s Zed. Developers use it because it’s fast. Same with Sublime Text.

Your criticism makes more sense with products targeting non-technical users though. But IMO tech choices have cascading effects. I won’t buy a vehicle if the infotainment software sucks, and that’s the 2nd largest purchase I’ll ever make.

Yes. I don't think Linux would have succeeded if written in a language other than C. Today is a different story.

Yes it matters to me as an end user if my web browser is more or less likely to have vulnerabilities in it. Choice of programming language has an impact on that. It doesn't have to be Rust, I'd use a browser written in Pony.

If I were making something that had to be low-level and not have security bugs, my statement would be:

> I’m not smart enough to build a big multi-threaded project in a manual memory-managed language that doesn't have vulnerabilities. I want help from the language & compiler.

The size and longevity of the team matters a lot too. The larger it gets the more problematic it is to keep the bugs out.

There's a big part of me that agrees with your implied conclusion, that it shouldn't matter.

On the other hand, I've found that core decisions like language ecosystem choice can be a good leading indicator of other seemingly unrelated decisions.

When I see someone choose a tool that I think is extremely well suited for a purpose, it makes me curious to see what else we agree on.

The Oven team, the ones who created the Bun runtime, is a good example for me. I think Zig is probably the best compromise out there right now, for my sensibilities. The Oven folks, who chose to use Zig to implement Bun, _also_ made a lot of product decisions I really agree with.

There have been some large scale companies that went under because of platforms chosen to develop their products in. First that comes to mind is MySpace with Dreamweaver.

https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator, the company that hosts Hacker News.

I think I'll take the side of no (as long as it's fast/safe/good) and also I never find the reasoning in these language comparisons to be that compelling anyways. A "why we like $FOO" is better than "why $FOO works better/is better for us than $BAR", since the latter is almost always going to be incomplete.

Most seem to agree that NeXTSTEP/macOS/iOS wouldn't have succeeded without Objective-C. So much of the functionality that made it stand out was predicated on Objective-C's somewhat unique programming model.

Of course, it's all just 1s and 0s at the end of the day. You can ultimately accomplish the same in any language. But the design of the language does shape the way developers end up thinking about the problems. If NeXT had used, say, C++ instead, it is unlikely that the people involved would have ever come to recognize the same possibilities.

There are second order effects. You definitely attract different types of talent depending on the technology stack of choice. And building the right group of talent around an early stage product/company is an extremely impactful thing on the product. And blogs are an impactful talent marketing source.

This doesn't guarantee any sort of commercial success because there are so many follow on things that are important (product/market fit, sales, customer success, etc.) but it's pretty rough to succeed in the follow ons when the product itself is shit.

For first order effects, if a product's target market is developer oriented, then marketing to things developers care about such as a programming language will help initial adoption. It can also help the tool get talked about more organically via user blogs, social media, word of mouth, etc.

Basically, yeah, it matters, but as a cog in a big machine like all things.

The opposite is true: there are a lot of projects that failed because of the chosen language.

This post is aimed at developers and hackernews is a technically focused forum. So I care as a developer.

If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck?

Ruby on Rails.

Now that you mention it I think this is a new trend. I pretty sure I've seen more "written in Rust/Go/Zig" than any other language out there. I've never seen a post like "new cli, written in C++" for example. I don't know if it's just some kind of tribalism or a way to attract talent to your project.

I think end users don't give a shit about the tech stack of a software. Why would they?

[dead]