Mike Coyle’s Weblog

Bill Clementson has a great post where he describes two high-profile cases where large companies (Yahoo and Sony) using mainstream technology platforms acquire smaller firms (Viaweb and Naughty Dog) that have gained competitive advantage using a less-popular but uber-powerful technology, specifically the LISP programming language.

While, at face value, this is an interesting story about the capabilities of LISP, I believe that a more profound (albeit obvious) message lies just below the surface:
There are often material sacrifices to be made in standardizing on mainstream technologies.

Bill’s article describes the less-than-stellar success that arose when the LISP apps were either rewritten or sidelined in the interest of integration with the acquirer’s environment.

I think that we’re currently in a period of app development history where there’s growing endorsement for non-mainstream application platforms in mainstream (i.e. non-scientific or academic) business and consumer applications.

If you look around, there are a number of cool and/or popular applications that are built atop non-mainstream platforms these days such as:

• Dabble (using the Smalltalk-based Seaside)
• reddit (using the Python-based web.py)
• Basecamp (using the Ruby-based Rails)

(Not to mention our very own ProjectPipe.com which is built atop Python and the Twisted networking framework.)

They say that all competition utlimately narrows down to a two-horse race. For a while, it appeared that those two horses were going to be Java and .NET. Now, I believe that the two horses are going to be:

• Mainstream Toolsets, namely .NET and Java (and PHP, based upon sheer numbers)
• Non-Mainstream Toolsets, such as Python, Ruby, LISP, and Smalltalk -based frameworks

where the specific toolset you pick is of lesser importance than its mainstream vs. non-mainstream identification. In other words, if it’s not .NET or Java, few people will care what you’re using.

I think that there’s a decent amount of empirical evidence to suggest that the productivity/power/agility/etc. provided by these non-mainstream toolsets far outweigh their tangible (non-FUD) downsides.

History will likely remember Ruby on Rails as the key technology nugget that really legitimized non-J2EE or and non-.NET application frameworks. While non-mainstream tools will always be considered “weird” by some, my bet is that there will be sizable growth in mindshare for these non-mainstream alternative platforms in the next two years.

One of my favorite quotes is from Hunter S. Thompson: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”.

In the next 2 years, I expect that when pros want to get their applications going, they’ll increasingly turn to the “weird”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2006 at 5:07 am and is filed under programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.