We can save a lot of time and effort by making our meaningless choices effortless. Pick the first one, or the one in alphabetical order or flip a coin. Merely have a rule and make the choice.
This point made by a recent post by the inimitable Seth Godin strikes the same chord as my SPARK Talk at this month’s NEPA Tech meet up.
I advise several companies and speak to dozens of entrepreneurs. Many of them make the same mistake – they give too much weight to some of their very early decisions and never getting started because they can’t decide.
I see it all the time. In many facets of business. Another way to phrase this situation is paralysis by analysis.
The example I used in my SPARk Talk was that of programmers that become dogmatic in their language or framework choice, or can’t decide at all which to use, or always want to jump to the latest buzz worthy trending language or framework for very early versions of their product. The result is that they never ship anything.
Choosing a language or framework is an important decision. But, not at the cost of starting. Just get started.
While we’re on this subject, let me be clear about how I would advise a company to make this choice. In many cases is doesn’t matter whatsoever what programming language or framework you decide to use for your app. At least not for the first few iterations of the product. In general, the customer will never know or care what you used to write the app. So, in this respect it doesn’t matter. However, if you’re going to maintain the code longterm, use a language or framework that makes you happy to type. If you’re going to hire a large team, use a language or framework that has the largest pool of talent to pull from. But please start!