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Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

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Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#21

Post by tomohawk »

Several years ago, our team refactored a large Java control system into a Ruby based one. The Ruby actually performed faster, scaled better, and was much easier to understand and maintain. The ergonomics of Ruby enabled clearer thinking about the problem, leading to the better results.

More recently, we've replaced Python, Ruby, and Java based systems with golang based ones. Not having to lug around a VM and associated other parts (jars, gems, ...) is a huge win. Performance is better across the board, and we've reduced the amount of hardware needed. There's also much better understanding of the code across the whole team.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#23

Post by valbaca »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #17

The SPARK people at AdaCore found a bug in the reference implementation of Skein just rewriting it in SPARK: http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/sparkskein...

Interesting. And the tl;dr for the bug is:

byte_count := (n+7) / 8;

When n is near max size, it overflows to a small number, then (small number) / 8 = 0

the fix is to restrict n to [0,MAX-7)

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#24

Post by daddykotex »

At work, we greatly benefited from a transition from Spring with Java to Play with Scala.

This mostly due to the inherent complexity in Spring and the fact that Spring developers are also Spring experts. When the main developer behind the application left, we struggled to add new features or even fix bugs because the team lacked the Spring expertise.

The rest of the business mostly dealt with Scala, so it was almost a no-brainer to go with Play.

The outcome has been very surprising. The application has better performance overall, is better suited for streaming and we have much more expertise in-house to add features and fix bugs.

The re-write was not without pain though. Spring is a well-supported and very rich framework. It probably does a bunch of things that the casual web developer will likely forget.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#25

Post by brightball »

abeisgreat wrote: post #6

The biggest change for me was when I switched to strictly typed languages. It doesn't matter if it's Go or Typescript or whatever. As long as it has types it dramatically improves maintainability and ease of scale.

I've never experienced this personally, although I hear it said a lot. I generally work on server side applications with a database behind them and 90% of the work involved is taking data from the client and putting it in the database or the other way around. The database handles actual type enforcement. The requests come in as strings and they are returned to the client in string based format.

Introducing types to the server side language has never done anything for me other than making sure that the types are in sync with those of the database while creating a lot of tedious overhead converting data that the application itself might not ever need to process to a particular type.

The Elixir gradual typing approach has always seemed like the ideal balance to me.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#26

Post by paulbjensen »

When our Rails team delivered our projects and Christmas came in 2010, we peeked our heads out and discovered Node.js, CoffeeScript, and WebSockets. We created a real-time web framework from the combination of those technologies, and demoed it at the Hackernews London meetup of June 2011. It was known as SocketStream.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#27

Post by ThrustVectoring »

jonahx wrote: post #15
carsongross wrote: post #13

This is more than a little self serving, but when I switched us over to intercooler.js it made a huge difference in our app. When I pulled the trigger on it I was terrified that I was screwing us over by not using Angular (which was the cool tech at the time) or some other more javascript-oriented solution. Thankfully it has worked out well, and my co-founders don't hate me any more than they already did before hand.…

This isn't surprising to me at all. Having the creator of a framework working with a team using a framework is a huge benefit, almost regardless of the framework quality (within reason). And that's not a dig at intercooler's quality (I've never used intercooler, and am no fan of Angular), but I do think it's a huge confound. Meaning, if I had access to creator of framework A on my team, and was choosing between frame…

If you like framework B more than A by too much, it seems unlikely to me that you'd have the creator of framework A on your team.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#28

Post by faitswulff »

bleonard wrote: post #22

Switching to React Native allowed our team of 6 to become a team of 2 and still go twice as quickly. It's not just the cross-platform capabilities - React is also just really great.

I have to wonder if the other 4 members of your team were as happy about the switch...

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#29

Post by seanwilson »

abeisgreat wrote: post #6

The biggest change for me was when I switched to strictly typed languages. It doesn't matter if it's Go or Typescript or whatever. As long as it has types it dramatically improves maintainability and ease of scale.

Agree with this. I've had a large JavaScript codebase where there were so many annoying edge cases mostly caused by variables being null/undefined when you didn't expect it and string/arrays values being mixed up. You could track them down eventually but there was always a feeling of unease that there was more bugs there. If you start using TypeScript with its non-null checking feature and type checking, you can catch so many of these kinds of bugs before even running the code and have high confidence you got them all.

Re: Ask HN: When has switching the language/framework made an important difference?

#30

Post by kornish »

tomohawk wrote: post #21

Several years ago, our team refactored a large Java control system into a Ruby based one. The Ruby actually performed faster, scaled better, and was much easier to understand and maintain. The ergonomics of Ruby enabled clearer thinking about the problem, leading to the better results. More recently, we've replaced Python, Ruby, and Java based systems with golang based ones. Not having to lug around a VM and associat…

Out of interest, to what degree do you think the improvement in comprehensibility is from the new ecosystem vs performing a rewrite with learnings from the original write?
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