[tmp_anon_22]

> how little credit is given to GPS in Uber's story

Uber would not exist without GPS. I wonder how many other of the unicorns:

* Twitter without Rails

* Facebook without PHP (I think this is fair but maybe not)

* Reddit without Python

* Tesla and Solar City without huge government subsidies

Crazy to think how many Lake Tahoe vacation homes were transferred thanks to these projects.

[foobarbaz33]

I don't think the programming language dependencies are comparable to tech like GPS.

Reddit was originally written in lisp. It was later rewritten in Python with a trivial amount of effort. And it could have be trivially rewritten in any other language as well. The languages are not that important. Having access to high level languages in general is important, but they are a dime a dozen.

[dylan604]

could you imagine the expense of a FAANG having to pay Microsoft Windows licensing for every machine they use? how would that affect a startup's runway?

so instead of the languages, maybe open it up to Linux/FOSS in general

[cosmotic]

There are a lot of alternative programming languages that those companies could have used. There's no GPS alternative for Uber.

[aunderscored]

GLONASS, But that's splitting hairs

[treeman79]

Alt to php at that point in time was usually Perl.

Don’t think Facebook would have succeeded with Perl.

[dasil003]

Middle three don't feel a major dependency. I would say:

- Twitter without iTunes Podcast Directory (because it killed Odeo, the parent business)

- Facebook without MySpace / Friendster

- Reddit without Digg / Slashdot

[CSMastermind]

Even then they might look different but someone would have had the idea for social media. Those exact companies might not exist or they might look different but it's not like the business model would go away.

Take away GPS and Uber is a fundamentally different product.

[trasz]

Reddit is more like Usenet than Slashdot.

I’d say Reddit is literally just a technically inferior version of Usenet.

[reidjs]

A better analogy may be most those couldn’t exist without the Internet

[axblount]

Maybe this is apocryphal, but I think I remember hearing that Reddit was originally written in some kind of lisp. Not to say it doesn't owe its success to python.

[Phrodo_00]

Very early versions, but they were already using python before you could create your own subreddits, for example (which is around the time when it started becoming more mainstream)

[bitwize]

Reddit without Python might still have been written in Lisp!