51–60 of 150 posts
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2852415
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I think Facebook chat had a very similar experience. The first version was written by someone who liked Erlang. Later on, when some performance issues came up (probably related to GC), no one knew Erlang, and all the high performance backend code in the company was in C++. So it made sense to rewrite the thing.
Then they acquired whatsapp that was written in Erlang.
I was an intern at Mixpanel at the time (but not the author of this article or involved in the discussed rewrite). For context, the company was then My recollection of events (of 8 years ago): The Erlang endpoint was written a year or two earlier as someone's first Erlang project, in a tiny org with no Erlang experience. The endpoint worked well enough and people moved onto other projects in the mostly Python codebas…
If you have some developer that wants to write something in a new (for your company) language, or even worse goes off and does so without asking, because he wants to try it out, you probably want to fire that guy. Either he doesn't understand the downsides or he does, but doesn't care.
I was an intern at Mixpanel at the time (but not the author of this article or involved in the discussed rewrite). For context, the company was then My recollection of events (of 8 years ago): The Erlang endpoint was written a year or two earlier as someone's first Erlang project, in a tiny org with no Erlang experience. The endpoint worked well enough and people moved onto other projects in the mostly Python codebas…
Is it common for an intern to get such an impactful project?
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Is it common for an intern to get such an impactful project?
Yeah; it’s actually pretty easy work. Interns have a lot of uncommitted time, and they’re going to leave soon so you don’t want to integrate them into the team too much. It’s also way easier to build to a well-defined spec (which an in-production endpoint would likely have). So you let them rewrite something that already works. If what they build is good, you‘ve just knocked out a good chunk of technical debt and fou…
And, of course, a company that puts this kind of work on the back of a temporary worker is not treating its own codebase with the respect it deserves. This is rolling the dice with your expertise store -- you have to hope they did it well, because they aren't going to be around to answer questions if they didn't.
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Then they acquired whatsapp that was written in Erlang.
And I think I had read that Whatsapp used Erlang because Facebook Chat was using Erlang and they thought Facebook knew what they were doing and decided to use the same tech. What a twist
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> they'd written a monolith instead of building a system where the message delivery was designed to be sharded; n Do some languages handle this differently? Isnt this based on how the code was written rather than a language natively sharding?
Sharding is basically a data storage concern, so it's not something that the language can really control. There are however, frameworks that enforce some level of "shardability". The Datastore (now Firestore) in AppEngine/Firebase comes to mind, in that your data is shared all over the place (the details are hidden from you), and you can't write un-indexed queries that don't scale well. The Datastore has some limitat…
Erlang encourages shardable solutions from OTP concepts being so strongly integrated into Erlang.
Them not being able to utilize Erlang well seems to be the gist of the article. The rest seems like a post-hoc rationalization. It's fair to switch away from a technology your team doesn't know well and doesn't want to learn. Maybe that should have been the title.
Long time, Dimi.. It's a favorite pet peeve of mine too that people often try to rationalize either their lack of experience with a platform or a broken architecture as a problem with the language in question. Though sometimes it's done because it helps paper over internal politics (e.g. lack of clout to be perceived to criticize past decisions) by blaming something external like a language or framework to justify ar…