How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go • Hacker News Board

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#271

Post by WildUtah » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 5:32 AM UTC

jbooth wrote: post #221

timr wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Invented Here syndrome goes away with general experience. It doesn't come back every time you switch to a new language. Just because I've never written Erlang doesn't mean that I will automatically try to write a random-number generator (say) the first time I need one in Erlang. I have enough experience to look for a library function first. Empirically, NIH tends to be more common in single-language developers, n…

I wasn't talking about NIH syndrome, I was talking about "I don't know that a common library exists for this standard use-case so I'm going to write my own one-off because I have a job to do". I mean, you can google for libraries but sometimes you just don't find them and then find out a few weeks later what you should have used.

That's just an imbalance in programming virtues: too much hubris, not nearly enough laziness (unknown impatience).

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#272

Post by desireco42 » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 5:53 AM UTC

I went briefly to through the comments, it seems that no-one is bothered with lack of details in this post, things are not logical at all, almost like it was written by PR agency in charge of promoting Go.

Except it is established business so I would assume things are true, but real motives are hidden. Go is obviously good language for some specific things, but it's not like ruby is pure trash, how come you did 'everything' in ruby, and then didn't know about eventmachine, but just had to rewrite things in Go.

And rewrite happened overnight, right?

A lot is missing from this story. I will definitely look more into Go, mostly because someone compared it in comments with TurboPascal, and I have fond memories of Borland tools, Pascal especially.

Go and Rails are so different that there is almost no point in comparing them.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#273

Post by burntsushi » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 6:02 AM UTC

trungonnews wrote: post #232

jlarocco wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really true. Granted Go doesn't have as many libraries as the more established languages, but to say there aren't many and there's "nothing to learn besides the language" is just flat out wrong. Just for starters there's http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/Projects

A seasoned Java developer is expected to have worked with one of the mainstream ORM like Hibernate or Ebean. But a Go developer gets away with not having to know an ORM because there is no mainstream ORM in Go. :)

So what, the lack of a mainstream ORM implies "So there is really nothing to learn besides the language itself"? I don't think so.

And there's probably more to a lack of an ORM other than "Go is immature." It's a fairly common opinion among the Go community that ORMs are not worth their complexity. I tend to share that opinion myself, after having worked with a few in a couple different languages.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#274

Post by fkdjs » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 6:06 AM UTC

gnuvince wrote: post #257

trungonnews wrote: post #244

I was originally very excited about Go when I first learned about it. But then I got tired and frustrated quickly after having to listen to the other Gophers telling me that I don't need this or that feature because there is a better way to do it in Go. Like. I don't need exceptions because Go function can return multiple values. I don't need a mocking framework like Mockito because Go has interfaces. I don't need an…

It's pretty typical of the Plan9 mentality. See this post on the Acme text editor: http://9fans.net/archive/2008/08/134

wow, worse than the irc python channel.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#275

Post by burntsushi » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 6:09 AM UTC

desireco42 wrote: post #272

I went briefly to through the comments, it seems that no-one is bothered with lack of details in this post, things are not logical at all, almost like it was written by PR agency in charge of promoting Go. Except it is established business so I would assume things are true, but real motives are hidden. Go is obviously good language for some specific things, but it's not like ruby is pure trash, how come you did 'ever…

> but real motives are hidden

Could you elaborate on this please? Are you referring to the OP's motives of publishing the article? Or of switching to Go?

> Go and Rails are so different that there is almost no point in comparing them.

Except when one solves the same problem better than the other.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#276

Post by dschiptsov » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 6:15 AM UTC

Science and engineering from Bell Labs behind Go is what make this possible. It is not a "different language", it is carefully selected design decisions and ideas behind it.

It relies on a principle of being good-enough, not to stuff everything in, as a "feature sellers" and "buzzword shouters" used to do.

There are also lot of work of great minds behind Lisps or Erlang, and same principles in a foundation.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#277

Post by trungonnews » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 6:19 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #262

trungonnews wrote: post #244

I was originally very excited about Go when I first learned about it. But then I got tired and frustrated quickly after having to listen to the other Gophers telling me that I don't need this or that feature because there is a better way to do it in Go. Like. I don't need exceptions because Go function can return multiple values. I don't need a mocking framework like Mockito because Go has interfaces. I don't need an…

Comments like this are weird. Go does not like exceptions. They've built a whole idiom around error returns. When you said, "I need exceptions", what did you expect them to say? "Oh, sorry, we forgot that, we'll get right on it"? I also don't understand what you mean by "interactive debugger". What is gdb if not an interactive debugger? Gdb is my go-to debugger for Ruby as well.

Something like RubyMine IDE debugger or Firebug javascript debugger.

If you are a Ruby developer then I highly recommend trying out RubyMine. I promise that you will never debug Ruby code using gdb again!

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#278

Post by trungonnews » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 6:20 AM UTC

prodigal_erik wrote: post #259

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh what? No, that couldn't possibly be less true. Have you ever heard of "interfaces" in Go? They're kind of an important feature.

I've only dabbled a bit but I haven't seen a DSL that easily creates a mock that implements all the methods of a given interface, verifies that methods were (not) called with expected arguments, and returns or throws canned values. It's not difficult to write mocks from scratch, but it's very repetitive and hard to skim what the test does.

You nailed it!

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#279

Post by burntsushi » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 6:22 AM UTC

trungonnews wrote: post #260

yannk wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr: I tried Go, but it wasn't like Ruby, so now I'm trying Scala.

Ha. Is there a high performance, compiled, and concurrent friendly language that looks like Ruby? Please share. :)

Rust might be your best bet.

I think better advice for you is to just stay away from opinionated languages. I don't think Rust falls into that category, but I'm not sure.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#280

Post by neya » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 6:22 AM UTC

It's funny that they argue that they dumped the JVM derivatives like Scala, but wouldn't exactly tell why, nor support their argument with any sort of data/logs.

I am genuinely curious to know why they chose Go over Scala. If it was the syntax, etc. I can partially agree because it's one of scala's weak points, but then they pitch the main reason citing performance, so I'm genuinely curious to know.