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Goodbye Joyent

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Re: Goodbye Joyent

#21

Post by pjmlp »

zelly wrote: post #18
sillysaurusx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I think Viaweb was the first web application (or at least, no one's disputed that claim) and they kept their choice to use lisp a secret until acquisition. If someone else was using lisp to make websites, it seems like they must have independently rediscovered the idea. It was started in 1995 and acquired in 1998, so that wasn't a very long time for lisp to come into the public consciousness. It seems like at be…

No one was making web applications with anything. The consumer-facing web was still in its infancy. > It was started in 1995 and acquired in 1998, so that wasn't a very long time for lisp to come into the public consciousness Lisp was the only game in town other than C for multiple decades. Absolutely everyone learned it in university. It was the main garbage collected scripting language, like Python today.

During the 80's and 90's that place belongs to Basic dialects, not Lisp.

And when Viaweb came to be, there was also ML, Smalltalk, Perl and Tcl to choose from.

This if we focus only on the context of UNIX, because otherwise the language spectrum gets even wider.

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#23

Post by qubex »

anon102010 wrote: post #15

The mongoDB comment rings true at least from the past Never heard of the OS mentioned

> Never heard of the OS mentioned

I hope for your sake that this admission won’t cause you to be brutally downvoted too. Here’s a pre-emptive +1 ;)

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#26

Post by patkai »

It is the sign of terrible incompetence to downsize people like him. If you ever get hold of people with this much competence then find a clever project for them, or create a new subsidiary.

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#27

Post by pjmlp »

elcritch wrote: post #19
sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

It’s kind of risky to have programmers who feel so passionately opinionated about the software that should power a business. It’s doubly tricky, because most companies pay lip service to passion. But like a chef that cares a bit too much about which cookware you use, it sometimes hinders the goal of serving 100 customers at noon. I respect that they’ve created their entire networking stack from the ground up. Few can…

> It’s kind of risky to have programmers who feel so passionately opinionated about the software that should power a business. While you have a point in general, I don't think that was a primary reason for Joyent losing the "cloud wars". At the most you can say is that passionate engineering doesn't always lead to commercial success. > I respect that they’ve created their entire networking stack from the ground up. F…

Actually IBM and Unisys were the first container companies.

The last couple of decades mainstream OSes have been catching up with mainframe world.

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#28

Post by pushpop »

qubex wrote: post #9

I had to look up ‘SmartOS’ and ‘OmniOS’ because I had no idea what they are. NOTE: This isn’t meant as an insult; it’s just that often people use terms as if they were universally known. He had hyperlinks to some of the more obscure items on the list but not the key items.

I’m surprised. They were massive names in the OS scene until recently. Their lineage can be traced back to Solaris and share many of the cool technologies that Sun developers pioneered. So much so that for the first few years of SmartOS, Linux felt like a hobbyist platform in comparison due to its lack of dtrace, containerisations, ZFS, etc.

Linux has come a long way since, which is a large part of the reason why SmartOS has become less relevant. The latter being a great shame because competition breeds innovation and we are losing a lot of interesting interesting Unixes from the public consciousness.

Edit: oh come on. I post this and it almost immediately gets negative karma despite being both factual and informative. A perfect example of the rife abuse of peer moderation on this site. I honestly don’t think I’ll bother wasting my time on here any more.

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#29

Post by jtuple »

Sad news. But, not unexpected given the state of Joyent in recent years.

Really happy Z got a chance to work at Joyent though, even if it was only for a few years.

For most of us ex-Basho (ie. Riak) engineers, Basho was a career highlight. We've mostly moved on to better paying, more stable jobs, but lost the magic / passion / joy that we had at Basho.

Ryan's the exception. I imagine he's loved his time at Joyent as much, if not more, than Basho.

Here's hoping lightning strikes for a third time and Ryan lands somewhere great after his winter break.

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#30

Post by p_l »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #17
zelly wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tradeoff is that if you use unpopular software, like lisp, you can often gain more leverage in specific situations. HN’s software is the most flexible codebase I’ve ever seen, but few have ever studied it deeply. Viaweb used those principles to dominate the competition at a time when everybody was writing websites in C. But are those days gone? In Paul Graham's days, Lisp was not as unpopular as it is today. It…

Hmm. I think Viaweb was the first web application (or at least, no one's disputed that claim) and they kept their choice to use lisp a secret until acquisition. If someone else was using lisp to make websites, it seems like they must have independently rediscovered the idea. It was started in 1995 and acquired in 1998, so that wasn't a very long time for lisp to come into the public consciousness. It seems like at be…

Viaweb started a year after complex web applications were done, including White House information system using COMLINK system built on CL-HTTP (designed at Intelligent Information Infrastructure Project at MIT AI Lab).

I think I've also seen GUI apps exported over HTTP using clickable image maps and early tricks for streaming images.

Viaweb was one of the first "make your own shop" web applications, yes. Not first web application.

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