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Reddit source code

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Re: Reddit source code

#31

Post by sudowhodoido »

iowai wrote: post #17

I once was an intern in a company that wanted to rewrite the whole Reddit code in .net. The founder was a charming person and managed to raise a huge pile of money. "We can redo this with current technology and elegant design! We will run circles around Reddit!". We had a great time. Free snacks, lot's of parties, luxurious office furniture, skateboarding in the hall... In the end, the company ran out of money before…

I must have spent my entire time between 2004-2008 working for companies that did that sort of thing (rewrite to .Net). Plenty of cash to burn with no real possibility of success and no business plan.

In two cases, the guys running it knew it was going to fail from day one and their business model was to do this in two year chunks, syphon the cash out of the VCs after talking the product up, live the high life and disappear for a bit.

I felt no shame working for them back then but I do now.

Re: Reddit source code

#32

Post by kysol »

weego wrote: post #24
cpach wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s odd. As if the programming language itself is what makes Reddit what it is :)

Unfortunately from my experience, people thinking that background technology choices can give them a consumer advantage is not that uncommon.

That or more hardware to overcome bottlenecks caused by bad code. "It's running slow, we need more memory!". After some investigation, really... you've got 8 joins without using keys, and you're getting paid more than us how?

Re: Reddit source code

#34

Post by seanmcdirmid »

iowai wrote: post #17

I once was an intern in a company that wanted to rewrite the whole Reddit code in .net. The founder was a charming person and managed to raise a huge pile of money. "We can redo this with current technology and elegant design! We will run circles around Reddit!". We had a great time. Free snacks, lot's of parties, luxurious office furniture, skateboarding in the hall... In the end, the company ran out of money before…

To be fair, you can build a decent social site out of .net; e.g. Stack Overflow does quite well. But its not a main factor.

Re: Reddit source code

#35

Post by Cthulhu_ »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #34
iowai wrote: post #17

I once was an intern in a company that wanted to rewrite the whole Reddit code in .net. The founder was a charming person and managed to raise a huge pile of money. "We can redo this with current technology and elegant design! We will run circles around Reddit!". We had a great time. Free snacks, lot's of parties, luxurious office furniture, skateboarding in the hall... In the end, the company ran out of money before…

To be fair, you can build a decent social site out of .net; e.g. Stack Overflow does quite well. But its not a main factor.

To be fair you can build a decent anything out of any language / framework / environment; the point is, technology doesn't matter that much if your product is good. Look at Twitter or something for example, they built a product in a language they were comfortable with, and evolved from there.

Re: Reddit source code

#36

Post by yaeger »

jzwinck wrote: post #3

What causes people to need to sprinkle license boilerplate everywhere, including in files which are otherwise completely empty (like r2/r2/config/__init__.py), and then to have to update them every year? See this commit: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/90cfcaaecc56cf35e758... It just seems to defy reason that we must make humans increment a number every year in every file in our projects, nevermind the fact t…

>Is this really the best we can do

Perhaps in places like github. With central versioning systems where the server is under our control we simply run daemons that check the copyright. Each user can define how it should work for them. If copyright is not okay the user can either a) have the submit fail so he is notified that it needs fixing or b) let it be fixed automatically by the daemon.

This fixing also includes adding a copyright notice to new files that didn't have any. Nicely defined depending on the file type.

The implementation was a one time effort which now saves us from doing exactly what they are doing now. Manually going through thousands of files to fix a copyright.

Re: Reddit source code

#37

Post by mdonohue »

weego wrote: post #24
cpach wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s odd. As if the programming language itself is what makes Reddit what it is :)

Unfortunately from my experience, people thinking that background technology choices can give them a consumer advantage is not that uncommon.

FYI, that includes pg's thinking on the use of lisp for viaweb

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Re: Reddit source code

#38

Post by smanuel »

iowai wrote: post #17

I once was an intern in a company that wanted to rewrite the whole Reddit code in .net. The founder was a charming person and managed to raise a huge pile of money. "We can redo this with current technology and elegant design! We will run circles around Reddit!". We had a great time. Free snacks, lot's of parties, luxurious office furniture, skateboarding in the hall... In the end, the company ran out of money before…

He was obviously obsessed by .net and circles. But what do you mean by "circles around Reddit" or "circles around something"? Like... g+ circles?

Re: Reddit source code

#39

Post by coldtea »

weego wrote: post #24
cpach wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s odd. As if the programming language itself is what makes Reddit what it is :)

Unfortunately from my experience, people thinking that background technology choices can give them a consumer advantage is not that uncommon.

>FYI, that includes pg's thinking on the use of lisp for viaweb

Yeah, I for one think this was equally flawed. People have made succesful and quickly iteratable web services/apps in all kinds of languages, including Perl and PHP.

Plus, one single data source like pg had is never that accurate, plus the fact he and Martin were already Lisp guru s helped them in their use of it.

Re: Reddit source code

#40

Post by eksith »

iowai wrote: post #17

I once was an intern in a company that wanted to rewrite the whole Reddit code in .net. The founder was a charming person and managed to raise a huge pile of money. "We can redo this with current technology and elegant design! We will run circles around Reddit!". We had a great time. Free snacks, lot's of parties, luxurious office furniture, skateboarding in the hall... In the end, the company ran out of money before…

Honestly the premise, the model and database matter a whole lot more than the language. The premise is the most important as how it's presented to everyone is determined by it. The model is only to help you get your head around it; users don't (and shouldn't have to) care what you do in the backend. The database will dictate what you choose to store and how often.

Even rubbish code, in any language, can survive for a lot longer by shifting the spotlight of scrutiny to the biggest bottleneck, the database. Which will also be the deciding factor in reducing growing pains.

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