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IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

reuters.com

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Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#181

Post by renegade-otter »

NomDePlum wrote: post #175
renegade-otter wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the claims that Go is easy just wrong. It's actually a harder language to write in because without discipline, you are going to end up maintaining massive amounts of boilerplate. That's from someone who did a bunch - Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, C++, Scala. Syntax is one thing, assembling an application with maintainable code is something else.

What in particular did you find difficult building a maintainable codebase in Golang? Not quite understanding the boilerplate reference. Code generation in Golang is something I've found removed a lot of boilerplate.

I am not used to writing code where 2/3 of it is "if err" statements.

Also, refactoring my logging statements so I could see the chain of events seemed like work I rarely had to do in other languages.

It's a language the designers of which - with ALL due respect - clearly have not built a modern large application in decades.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#183

Post by janosdebugs »

NomDePlum wrote: post #175
renegade-otter wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the claims that Go is easy just wrong. It's actually a harder language to write in because without discipline, you are going to end up maintaining massive amounts of boilerplate. That's from someone who did a bunch - Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, C++, Scala. Syntax is one thing, assembling an application with maintainable code is something else.

What in particular did you find difficult building a maintainable codebase in Golang? Not quite understanding the boilerplate reference. Code generation in Golang is something I've found removed a lot of boilerplate.

Not the parent, but I find that doing dependency injection or defensive programming results in a lot of boilerplate. Custom error types are extemely wordy. The language also doesn't allow for storing metadata with types, only on structs as tags, which seriously hampers the ability to generate code. For example, you can't really express the concept of a slice in a slice containing an integer needing validation metadata well. You'll need to describe your data structure externally (OpenAPI, JSON schema, etc) and then generate code from that.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#184

Post by jmspring »

rank0 wrote: post #94
calgoo wrote: post #49

Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS. Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.

I don’t understand people’s beef with IBM. They have been responsible for incredible R&D within computing. I even LIKE redhat/fedora! HashiCorp had already been sold out since waaaay before this acquisition and I also don’t understand why their engineers are seen as “special”…

IBM was taken over by bean counters years ago. There were researchers and others that would literally skip being in or find a way to avoid bean counters when they walked through IBM Research Labs (like Almaden Research Center) years ago (heard from multiple people years back that were working on contracts/etc there - mainly academics).

Also, IBM has been extremely ageist in their "layoff" policies. They also have declined in quality by outsourcing to low cost/low skill areas.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#185

Post by dontdoxxme »

alecsm wrote: post #165
sureglymop wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding Red Hat, I dearly hope someone will replace the slow complicated mess that is ansible. It's crazy that this seems to be the best there is...

Why slow and complicated? We're just starting to implement it and we've only heard good things about it.

Ansible is great if you have workflows where sysadmins SSH to servers manually. It can pretty much take that workflow and automate it.

The problem is it doesn’t go much beyond that, so you’re limited by SSH roundtrip latency and it’s a pain to parallelize (you end up either learning lots of options or mitogen can help). However fundamentally you’re still SSHing to machines, when really at scale you want some kind of agent on the machine (although ansible is a reasonable way to bootstrap something else).

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#186

Post by tristan957 »

op00to wrote: post #166
rezonant wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet they'll organize it under Red Hat, and Red Hat will apply their open source policy to it, and that will involve reverting to OSI approved licenses

Red Hat is a shell of itself. There is no appetite for taking on Terraform when Ansible is their ugly baby.

I've found they are complements to each other. One provisions infra, the other customized that infra for your needs.

But I could be totally off-base.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#187

Post by glenngillen »

jbm wrote: post #97
calgoo wrote: post #49

Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS. Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.

A lot of the people I respected from Heroku went there, glad they got a chance to use their skills to build something useful and profitable; glader still that they got their payout. Sadly I echo your sentiment about the future, as someone who has heard second-hand about the quality of work at modern Redhat. I am wondering how many more rounds of consolidation are left until there is no more space to innovate and we o…

Heh at “got their payout”. HashiCorp IPO’d at $80, employees are locked up for 6 months. This sale is at $35.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#188

Post by vundercind »

bloopernova wrote: post #160
vundercind wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something like the JSON version of Terraform that can be generated by different tools, but an open standard instead. God, please no. The worst thing about all these tools is the terrible formats they keep choosing. Given the directions we’ve (“cutting edge” programmers and server ops folks) chosen to go instead, leaving XML behind was a big mistake. I’d prefer something better, but yaml and json are so terrible tha…

You'd write in a language designed for humans, and that would get translated into a language for computers. In other words, JSON. What are your reasons for disliking JSON?

Terrible, awful type system. And I just mean at the level of primitive types it can represent, nothing fancy. It doesn’t even have a date type, let alone things like decimals.

That’d be my argument specifically against using it to communicate between pieces of software—at least if you’re hand-writing it there’s the excuse that it’s kinda, sorta easy to read and write (at least, people say that—IMO it’s only true for tiny, trivial examples, but that may be a matter of taste)

My take on it as a hand-written config/data language is that it’s simply absurd. JSON-schema is terribly unwieldy, but also the lingua franca, so if you want to keep your sanity you write something better to define your data structures (probably in some actual programming language) and generate JSON schema to share structure definitions among readers. Oh my—why?

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#189

Post by williamDafoe »

rahkiin wrote: post #123
mywittyname wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the licensing changes? I see a lot of references to it as though it was common knowledge, but I'm not aware of them. Edit: found something: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...

Nobody else is bow allowed to make a public offering of a terraform-using product. That is, you can not provide terraform as a service. Gitlab, Azure DevOps, etc all have to move to something else as they can not provide terraform builders without a special license. This was a major blow to the participating open source community. The license bow used is also vague and untested.

Also you should know that while the terraform language is okay (albeit a little too dogmatic in a functional programming sense for my tastes), the terraform cloud product (runners for terraform executions) is pretty terrible, slow, and overpriced, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory based on the terraform language.

This encouraged at least 4 companies to launch terraform-cloud-like products, and rather than compete and provide better service, Hashicorp responded by saying "take it or leave it, internet!" and they closed the open-source license on the interpreter (BUSL)... At my previous company we were driven away from terraform cloud and into the arms of env0 ... when it often takes 10 minutes for an execution to begin and you have no other executions in progress you realize that the terraform cloud SAAS product is just a total joke...

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#190

Post by djbusby »

janosd wrote: post #174
hpeter wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I found Go to be a very productive and easy language, coming from Typescript. But I had a similar experience like yours with PHP, I just couldn't get into it.

After having written probably over 100k lines of Go code, my impression is that Go is simple, but not easy. The language has very few features to learn, but that results in a lot of boilerplate code and there are more than a few footguns burried in the language itself. (My favorite [1]) I find it very hard to write expressive, easy to read code and more often than not I see people using massive switch-case statements…

Is it because secondSlice is a reference (pointer?) to firstSlice?
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