What do i build my alpha platform on, PHP, Ruby, Python, .NET, etc?

Question

I am developing a social networking website in the facebook/foursquare-ish space. I have gotten such varied feedback on what platform I should develop in. Of course it will be heavily influenced by who I hire, but i was hoping for a little additional feedback from the larger community. Thanks.

Answer 1

It doesn't matter.

StackOverflow was written in ASP .NET MVC and it's awesome.
Twitter was written in Rails and it's super popular.
Facebook was written in PHP and half a billion people use it.

It's not the technology, it's the community. That's the hard part.

Just pick one and go. Your best bet might actually be to find the technology that the most smart people are using while still working for the least amount of money.

Answer 2

Write in assembler if you're comfortable with that. :)

Some questions you should ask yourself:

• Are there hosting restrictions? No point in coding ASP.net when you have a PHP-only host/server.
• Are there technical restrictions? E.g. if you want to use SQL Server as a back-end, going with ASP.net may make your life easier.
• What other requirements do you have? Does it have to run on the JVM? Do you want to compile stuff all the time or do you want an interpreted language? etc. etc.
• What experience do you have? If you're already familiar with Python, why switch to Ruby?

My best tip is: use what's best for the job at hand according to the above questions. For me, I'd use Ruby on Rails for the project you described. Rails offers all the tools I need for a large project like that.

Please let us know when and what you've decided :)