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How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

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

#201

Post by MBCook »

cpprototypes wrote: post #103
MBCook wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's quite strange to me that people would identify as or look for a "[language] programmer". I understand people doing this. First you can be more sure of what you're getting. It's sad that tests like FizzBuzz are so useful, but it's a fact. If I hire a Java developer for a Java position, I can figure out there Java skills. If I look at a PHP developer, it's more of a crapshoot. They may have a lot of PHP experien…

How did you convince them to hire you when you had no professional experience? Did you have to take a pay cut to do it?

I didn't get hired for the job, after the first interview I bowed out. I ended up in another mostly Java position (although we've also started doing some Obj-C).

I had 4+ years of working on a reasonably sized and complicated Java application. In addition, a few years before I used Python for personal projects so I could show some experience.

But it turned out the position was largely for front end development, and not some of the more back-end stuff I'm interested in. I think they liked me (don't know how I compared to other candidates) but I thanked them for their time and told them the position wouldn't be a fit for me.

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

#202

Post by mjn »

kyllo wrote: post #74
TillE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite strange to me that people would identify as or look for a "[language] programmer". Sure, I happen to write more C++, Python, and C than anything else, but I've dabbled in just about everything and could reach comfortable proficiency in a matter of weeks. Most of programming and all of computer science is universal. Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default.

This is why Joel Spolsky correctly observed that the replacement of C/C++ and functional languages with Java in university CS curricula is a tragedy. If you don't understand pointers or recursion, you are not a polyglot and you cannot pick up just any language in a matter of weeks. The "[language] programmer" (where [language] usually = Java or .NET) trend is a misguided attempt by industry to commoditize programmer…

My intro programming course (in high school) was in C++, and I think it would've scared me off programming entirely if I hadn't picked up mIRC-script (a very different language) on my own as a hobby. There is so much accidental complexity in C++ that it's a pretty terrible introductory language. We literally spent several weeks of the semester on how to get input and output to work properly through the giant mess that is iostreams.

At the introductory level, I think the biggest issue is teaching "computational thinking" [1] or "procedural literacy" [2]: getting people thinking about the idea that you're writing specifications for a machine to carry out computations. From that perspective, it's best to pick a language that lets you get to algorithmic logic as quickly as possible.

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/publications/Wing0...

[2] http://dm.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/MateasOTH2005....

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

#203

Post by jlarocco »

trungonnews wrote: post #164
gilgoomesh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. It depends if you're going to spend years training someone or if you need an expert right now. My experience is that it is impossible to maintain expert level skills in more than one or two language + library environments. You can remain familiar with other environments but you don't have the time to be an expert. While I sometimes switch between C-family lang…

Go as of today doesn't have too many libraries available. So there is really nothing to learn besides the language itself.

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

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

#204

Post by jbooth »

timr wrote: post #177
gilgoomesh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. It depends if you're going to spend years training someone or if you need an expert right now. My experience is that it is impossible to maintain expert level skills in more than one or two language + library environments. You can remain familiar with other environments but you don't have the time to be an expert. While I sometimes switch between C-family lang…

"It depends if you're going to spend years training someone or if you need an expert right now." I'm not going to claim that there are no legitimate reasons to hire people who are narrow experts in Blub (and only Blub), but I'm having a hard time thinking of any. At an established company, you've got the luxury of time -- there's rarely a good reason to "need an expert right now" that isn't just a contractor. At a st…

Even at an established company, a really smart language newbie could write a bunch of ad-hoc code that does almost the same thing as well-understood libraries that everyone more experienced in the language uses. Even if his code was relatively high-quality, now you have a bunch of extra stuff to maintain, and everyone who interacts with it will have to learn this thing instead of just using the library everyone knows. I've done this in languages I'm unfamiliar with and will probably continue to do so.

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

#205

Post by jasongrout »

rcb wrote: post #79
methehack wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey OP! I appreciate your sharing. Since you came from ruby and we're on the topic of the language itself, I'd appreciate your impression of how well Go supports collections. Is there or could one write something like http://underscorejs.org/ ? Can you do this kind of thing? [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].reject {|i| i I did the go tutorial the other day and I became a little worried that one would not be able to do this kind of th…

If you're looking for more elegant methods of expressing this in a higher performance runtime, here are two examples. Erlang: [I+9 || I = 3] Haskell: [i+9 | i = 3] Like go, both Erlang and Haskell both have strong concurrency stories. For an I/O bound server in a production environment, Erlang is a very safe choice. Compared to these list comprehensions, that ruby example looks unwieldy.

Even python looks more readable to me: [i+9 for i in range(1,6) if i>=3]

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

#206

Post by rdtsc »

jaggederest wrote: post #153
rektide wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very sympathetic to your tech-on-tech-on-tech-on-tech hogwashery promulgated by open sourcers & vendors prosteltyzing their wonderful solutions and the other acculturation factors that permits developers approaches other than trying & seeing & exploring- That said, you are wrong. I'm not a Go user and I don't care for it, but Go is fundamentally different and better than most runtimes. Go has it's own green threa…

Ia, Ia, Erlang Ftagn! I agree though, I just wish that Go would have developed from Erlang as a runtime. The Erlang virtual machine and systems are beautiful things - I used them for some wire-level work on a project and bitfields are awesome, and it provided a clean interface to a more 'normal' language to display to the user, fail-fast fault tolerance on a public safety project, neat stuff. It's just erlang-the-pro…

> It's just erlang-the-programming-language that has all the Prolog warts that scares people, I think.

I must be strange but I actually like Erlang's syntax. Its pattern matching is really hard to beat. Also with Erlang, it is not just about the language unless one just wants to learn academic FP or Actor model concepts -- it is about the framework. Debugging, tracing, distribution all those come as part of the package.

Think of Erlang as a tank. It might not be pretty and slick as a new Mercedes, but when you go into some battle, you need to learn to operate a tank, a shiny Mercedes will only take you so far.

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

#207

Post by jbooth »

azakai wrote: post #77
DASD wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a citation for Mozilla using Go? I would be a bit surprised given their(Mozilla) development of Rust.

Rust and Go are not similar or competing. They are both new, but aside from that the differences are huge. So if a project uses one, that doesn't mean the other was a possibility for that project too.

They're not similar at all, but both were designed to replace C++. That sort of means that they're competing for the use-case of "things I would write in C++ if it wasn't a god-awful nightmare to do so".

From there, though, you're right that they take very, very different approaches.

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

#208

Post by drivebyacct2 »

jbooth wrote: post #198
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? Is this just a coincidence that another throwaway named "TakeTwo" and then "TresAmiga" are both making throw aways and dismissing all Go users? Jesus. What he's describing is far more than possible using interfaces. I have plenty of code that does so. How is that "wrong and he knows it". Your worse than any Go fan here. Where the hell does someone get off being vitriolic about a language or someone's prefe…

There's some idiots who troll the #golang-nuts freenode channel occasionally with a bunch of spam saying 'node is way better!'. I assume they're not gainfully employed, or else they would understand that the two languages/platforms have very different goals and principles.

`chord`? Yeah, I was in there and was one of the people feeding him/her, I'm ashamed to say. I'd had a few beers and wasn't on my best behavior.

Chord was on about "Rails" is better, couldn't fathom a web world without MVC and failed to understand that Rails was just a framework on Ruby and that one could write similar helpers in Go.

It was the perfect example of Dunning-Kruger. Painful to witness.

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

#209

Post by [deleted] »

stcredzero wrote: post #171
16s wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ and Python pretty much run everything, everywhere. Standard, open languages are hard to beat when you want to fully control your development stack and not worry about future control issues. I wish go was an ISO standard like C++, I'd be more interested if it was.

> C++ and Python pretty much run everything, everywhere. I don't think so. Last I heard, there was still a lot of COBOL out there.

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by jbooth »

paddyforan wrote: post #172
paddyforan wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this would be a fun exercise, so I implemented the Go equivalent. Can anyone get it to fewer lines? It abandoned all pretenses of readability long ago. http://play.golang.org/p/M5VaeIgQ-q

Updated to generalise a bit more. If this ever came up in code review, I'd probably facepalm pretty hard. http://play.golang.org/p/YUQSZgFx_b

Ha. Yeah, the map() and reject() function defs are fine but the actual usage is a little eye-bleed inducing :)
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