11–20 of 178 posts
Shocking that using a language that no one use was a mistake on the long term. It made 0 sense what so ever to use it in the first place.
For every widely used technology, someone had to be the first. And then some small group had to be the early adopters.
Groupon was prototyped in Wordpress.
Shocking that using a language that no one use was a mistake on the long term. It made 0 sense what so ever to use it in the first place.
very strange and odd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OTOH an interesting language can be a recruiting draw. It probably helped them recruit engineers who were interested in the distributed systems and concurrency problems they were trying to solve. See for example Jane Street with OCaml. [edit: oops, thanks for the heads up on the spelling :)]
OCaml is old and reliable, and I think it was already proven to work in the industry when Jane Street chose it. Even if it wasn't the best programming language ever, it was still a strong choice at the time, and still is. Pony on the other hand was and still is very young. I'm not saying it's a bad choice, but it's definitely not the same risk profile as OCaml. It's just OCaml by the way, for Objective Caml. Unless y…
My experience is quite similar : I either end up working with clients who are already using Spark etc, or they don’t have a mature data engineering lab. In both cases, deploying a model to production is always the most challenging.
I hope their MLOps strategy is better, than just binding to MLFlow. This tool is absolutely not ready for prime time, and plagued by bad product decisions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OTOH an interesting language can be a recruiting draw. It probably helped them recruit engineers who were interested in the distributed systems and concurrency problems they were trying to solve. See for example Jane Street with OCaml. [edit: oops, thanks for the heads up on the spelling :)]
OCaml is old and reliable, and I think it was already proven to work in the industry when Jane Street chose it. Even if it wasn't the best programming language ever, it was still a strong choice at the time, and still is. Pony on the other hand was and still is very young. I'm not saying it's a bad choice, but it's definitely not the same risk profile as OCaml. It's just OCaml by the way, for Objective Caml. Unless y…
Not really. Outside of Jane Street OCaml has scarcely been proven to work in the industry now. As a big OCaml fan and former OCaml professional, I say this lovingly: it was (and remains) popular in academia and that's mostly it. And Pony is roughly as old now as OCaml was when Jane Street started using it.
The actual reason OCaml's risk profile was much lower was because it effectively has the backing of the French government and academy, which is quite the boon.
IIRC Jane Street chose OCaml basically because Yaron Minsky was brought on as CTO, he had worked with it in school and was a fan of it, and they knew that for the sort of work they were doing OCaml would give them an edge (speed of development and runtime efficiency) and they calculated that its relative obscurity and poor community support wouldn't be a liability for the sort of work they were doing. And remember that it was the year 2000 - Perl was basically the only language with the sort of library ecosystem (CPAN) that is expected of languages now: poor community support was much less of a liability then.
https://corecursive.com/055-unproven-with-sean-allen/#consid...
This feels like the same pattern as Dark leaving OCaml for F#: https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml// . Ecosystem matters a lot these days. Outside of these two specific cases, I wonder if we're, as an industry, too afraid of writing this kind of stuff now I feel like it was done a lot before, and not at all these days. Sure, NIH syndrome is a fallacy, but having to write one library may not be so bad. I would be…
* Most existing libraries are kind of bad anyway so you're not missing out much by not using them
* If you write everything yourself you get system expertise "for free", and gaining expertise in something that already exists is hard
* You can tailor everything to your business requirements
* Writing libraries is "fun work" so it's easier to be productive while doing it
Last year they discussed why they didn’t choose rust (predicted 12-18 months to build a runtime that met their requirements) or erlang (performance too slow): https://corecursive.com/055-unproven-with-sean-allen/#consid...
Shocking that using a language that no one use was a mistake on the long term. It made 0 sense what so ever to use it in the first place.
I don't read this as "it was a mistake to use Pony." They state that: > in the meantime data science and machine learning continued to explode ... With the increasing focus on MLOps, Rust became a better fit This sounds like, "Our business goals shifted, as did the industry around data science, and Rust's maturity improved such that it made sense for us to migrate our stack."
I think it's fair to say looking back it was a mistake to pick Pony on the assumptions it provided marginal benefit for the exact needs of the business day 1 but at the same time I think it's fair to say that picking Pony was not a mistake as it allowed them to get where they are today.