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As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

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Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#101

Post by alabut »

_delirium wrote: post #85
squidsoup wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this time and time again, but what if your application is a genuine ball of mud? Would you really not advocate a rewrite for an unmaintainable spaghetti classic asp app still in production today?

Microsoft could be one example of a successful one. Their flagship Windows codebase that ran the 3.1->95->98->ME line was basically ditched with the rewrite-from-scratch NT (famously done by an ex-VMS team), which later had some APIs ported to it to make Windows 2000 and especially XP be close to drop-in replacements for the old line, while not really sharing much code. I think in retrospect that was probably a good…

You covered Windows and Linux - don't forget Apple's switch to OS X. They wouldn't done a wholesale switch at some point even if they hadn't gone with something unix-based because the other alternative was Copeland, the internal project to do a complete rewrite.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#102

Post by davidw »

MartinCron wrote: post #77
squidsoup wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this time and time again, but what if your application is a genuine ball of mud? Would you really not advocate a rewrite for an unmaintainable spaghetti classic asp app still in production today?

I would advocate an incremental rewrite of parts of the unmaintainable spaghetti classic asp until there's none of the spaghetti left. It's easier to rewrite part of a system than an entire system. Release to production dozens, if not hundreds of times. Releases are non-events, rollbacks are non-events. A system-wide ground-up rewrite with a big-bang switchover at the end is a classic clusterfuck recipe. It's a shame…

> incremental rewrite of parts of the unmaintainable spaghetti classic

Sounds good in theory. In practice? Part of the problem with many big ball of mud systems is that all the parts depend on and talk to all the other parts. Want to fix that horrid DB schema? You'll have to rewrite all the code that talks to it, or rewrite it to talk to an intermediary. Want to rewrite that horrid bit of code that's called foobar_20040623 ("foobar" has been changed, but yes, I saw this in some PHP code...), you'll have to find out what all it interacts with, and likely redo that too.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#103

Post by davidw »

dillydally wrote: post #97
ojbyrne wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the real story is different. My rough guess at it is * the main marketing tool that digg has left is "Kevin Rose as genius" * Kevin and the people he drinks with pushed for the adoption of new cool technology. * the entire thing was a giant clusterfuck because of Kevin and the people he drinks with. * but once that became obvious there was a need for a scapegoat so that digg could keep its primary marketing…

That reads like sour grapes.

That doesn't necessarily make it wrong, either:-)

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#104

Post by binaryfinery »

dillydally wrote: post #97
ojbyrne wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the real story is different. My rough guess at it is * the main marketing tool that digg has left is "Kevin Rose as genius" * Kevin and the people he drinks with pushed for the adoption of new cool technology. * the entire thing was a giant clusterfuck because of Kevin and the people he drinks with. * but once that became obvious there was a need for a scapegoat so that digg could keep its primary marketing…

That reads like sour grapes.

Reads like "industry experience" to me.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#105

Post by papaf »

_delirium wrote: post #85
squidsoup wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this time and time again, but what if your application is a genuine ball of mud? Would you really not advocate a rewrite for an unmaintainable spaghetti classic asp app still in production today?

Microsoft could be one example of a successful one. Their flagship Windows codebase that ran the 3.1->95->98->ME line was basically ditched with the rewrite-from-scratch NT (famously done by an ex-VMS team), which later had some APIs ported to it to make Windows 2000 and especially XP be close to drop-in replacements for the old line, while not really sharing much code. I think in retrospect that was probably a good…

Its a good point that NT was a successful rewrite. However, its worth noting how this was done. NT was originally aimed at a different market, there was a overlap of several years where the old system was still available AND NT ran Windows 3.1 apps in their own subsystem which contained .... the codebase of Windows 3.1.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#106

Post by c00p3r »

nl wrote: post #96
c00p3r wrote: post #79

Let me guess - the problem is about the difference between theory and practice. In theory, Java is great and Cassandra is great. In practice - Java under a heavy load is a disaster, because it was never designed for it, and Cassandra is a just a hype and propaganda. Face the reality - it doesn't work in production as it supposed to - as a primary storage engine. People at the Digg aren't amateur idiots, so I think th…

> In practice - Java under a heavy load is a disaster Google's heavy use of serverside Java would indicate otherwise. > because it was never designed for it Yes it was. Java has a lot of problems, but one thing that isn't a problem is heavy load. > Cassandra is a just a hype and propaganda Facebook seems to be using it ok.

Google probably use server side Java without a really heavy load, and just add more servers to keep the load low.

System which was designed for being isolated from an OS (leave alone hardware) will have a bottleneck exactly in this level.

Facebook doesn't use it as a primary storage with a high load.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#107

Post by riffraff »

c00p3r wrote: post #84
soofaloofa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digg isn't a startup. It started in 2004 and has been mature for about 5 years. They are a business now. And a big one at that.

So, why not just pay to Cassandra's authors for a quick fix? Because they can't?

because in part they are the cassandra authors, I'd say. They have been contributing code to cassandra for quite a while.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#108

Post by c00p3r »

riffraff wrote: post #107
c00p3r wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, why not just pay to Cassandra's authors for a quick fix? Because they can't?

because in part they are the cassandra authors, I'd say. They have been contributing code to cassandra for quite a while.

That is it! So the problem seems to be a complex one. Some part of it I think is an ordinary Java issues - what happens when there is not enough memory, and system start use swap, what happens when a connection rate is too fast while system is doing a heavy IO? What happens during recovery of network operation or replication failure and so on. The second part is the complexity of the software itself, but not the complexity of the algorithms or tasks - it isn't a rocket science, but added artificial complexity due to all those CrappyFactoryManager().GetSpecialShitFactory().instantiateANewCrap() and so on - seem like no one can comprehend the whole mess itself. In the other hand, this failure probably will cause some improvements or at least more attention to Cassandra project, and everyone who uses it will benefit.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#109

Post by rythie »

_delirium wrote: post #85
squidsoup wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this time and time again, but what if your application is a genuine ball of mud? Would you really not advocate a rewrite for an unmaintainable spaghetti classic asp app still in production today?

Microsoft could be one example of a successful one. Their flagship Windows codebase that ran the 3.1->95->98->ME line was basically ditched with the rewrite-from-scratch NT (famously done by an ex-VMS team), which later had some APIs ported to it to make Windows 2000 and especially XP be close to drop-in replacements for the old line, while not really sharing much code. I think in retrospect that was probably a good…

I think the NT and OSX updates were absolutely required due to architectural reasons which impact security, 98/ME and MacOS 9 just simply weren't suited to types of threats on the internet (no support for dropping process privileges, file permissions, cutting direct access to hardware etc.). If you think XP is bad in 2010, think what Me would be like if widely installed still, one program crashing the whole machine, boot sector viruses etc.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#110

Post by cameronh90 »

c00p3r wrote: post #106
nl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In practice - Java under a heavy load is a disaster Google's heavy use of serverside Java would indicate otherwise. > because it was never designed for it Yes it was. Java has a lot of problems, but one thing that isn't a problem is heavy load. > Cassandra is a just a hype and propaganda Facebook seems to be using it ok.

Google probably use server side Java without a really heavy load, and just add more servers to keep the load low. System which was designed for being isolated from an OS (leave alone hardware) will have a bottleneck exactly in this level. Facebook doesn't use it as a primary storage with a high load.

What would you prefer to write web applications in? C++?

Most languages used in web programming are divorced from the hardware, and either use a virtual machine (e.g. Java, .NET) or an interpreter (PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby).

Virtually no-one uses a low level language for web programming, and the benchmarks say that the virtual machines are faster than interpreters. Java is very fast and efficient once it's running, but initial start-up time is often slower than interpreted languages due to the JIT compilation, but servers rarely "start up". If you're really hitting a barrier with Java's performance, just as with other non-native languages, you can write the performance critical section in C.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan...

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