Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#41

Post by volaski » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #29

exelius wrote: post #2

Parse never made sense to me. I could see a service like Parse being useful, but it would need to be owned / operated by a nonprofit in order to gain any adoption. Otherwise, it's just another proprietary platform that will get shut off or changed once Facebook (or whoever) pivots to another business model to address that market. There's certainly demand, but I think most developers are wary about putting their compa…

It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…

i think what the op meant was that it didn't make sense because it's owned by facebook. Heroku being owned by Salesforce makes much more sense because that's their business models are aligned. I remember the first time I was about to try out Parse, fortunately that's around when Parse got acquired by Facebook and I decided not to take a risk. It especially didn't make sense for me because I was going to build a social app. It doesn't make sense to build a social app on a platform owned by a social app company.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#42

Post by jt2190 » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 7:53 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #29

exelius wrote: post #2

Parse never made sense to me. I could see a service like Parse being useful, but it would need to be owned / operated by a nonprofit in order to gain any adoption. Otherwise, it's just another proprietary platform that will get shut off or changed once Facebook (or whoever) pivots to another business model to address that market. There's certainly demand, but I think most developers are wary about putting their compa…

It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…

While I agree completely with your comment, I wished you'd written "made architectural choices based on facts that are no longer true" instead of "is an idiot." Nobody sets out to make bad choices on purpose, and only the extremely lucky make architectural choices that survive massive growth.

(I believe Etsy had a policy of rewrites needing to support current needs multiplied by five. This acknowledges that there's a reasonable trade off between current needs and future-proofing.)

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#43

Post by mintplant » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 7:54 PM UTC

return0 wrote: post #37

nostrademons wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…

Did facebook move away from PHP ? Did google radically switch stacks ?

Facebook rewrote PHP and switched various components to other systems entirely. It's not like they're still running their original LAMP stack.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#44

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 7:59 PM UTC

return0 wrote: post #37

nostrademons wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…

Did facebook move away from PHP ? Did google radically switch stacks ?

Facebook's backend is, to my knowledge, largely C++, connected via Thrift. The frontend started out as PHP, eventually got compiled to C++ via HipHop, replaced HipHop with HHVM, and then added support for Hack. My understanding is that they're gradually adding more React to it as well. FB also includes a number of specialized services, eg. Chat & Whatsapp are written in Erlang.

Google as written by Larry Page was done in Java. It was rewritten in Python by Scott Hassan before the company was incorporated. As of 1999, the webserver and crawler were still in Python. It was almost completely rewritten (multiple times) in C++ shortly thereafter for efficiency. Most of the Google Apps (GMail, Docs, Plus, etc.) are written in Java. The webserver for Search shifted over to a combination of Java and two different DSLs in 2010; I worked on the implementation of this. My comment is lightly paraphrased from a remark Larry Page gave when asked why Google doesn't adopt more modern programming frameworks like Rails or Node (it was in 2011, when both of these were still state-of-the-art).

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#45

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 8:07 PM UTC

dastbe wrote: post #39

nostrademons wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…

your second paragraph would be incredibly unfortunate. most of the sane large companies i've worked at or know people who work at have settled on 2-4 languages -one of which is usually the legacy starting language-which they provide tier-1 support through dedicated teams providing "the stack" in various forms. everything else is community owned and caveat emptor. its why startups should be able to use whatever langua…

The "2-4 official languages" dictum is usually put in place after the company churns through those 2-4 languages in the first 2-4 years of its existence. Basically everybody realizes how costly it is and says "no more". At least that's how it was at Google, which is perhaps the most famous example of the "We have 4 official languages, and you're not introducing a new one" policy.

I've worked in startups that tried to implement the "1-2 languages only" (usually Java and Jython/JRuby/Groovy) policy as a startup, and they didn't go anywhere. That team of prima donnas who is willing to mortgage the startup's future in order to ship an awesome product seems to be a necessary feature of startup success, and only successful startups get to hire the team of professionals who will button down everything, choose "official" languages, and build tier-1 infrastructure. So yes, it's incredibly unfortunate, but this is the industry we live in. Pick which role you wish to occupy accordingly.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#46

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 8:13 PM UTC

jt2190 wrote: post #42

nostrademons wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…

While I agree completely with your comment, I wished you'd written "made architectural choices based on facts that are no longer true" instead of "is an idiot." Nobody sets out to make bad choices on purpose, and only the extremely lucky make architectural choices that survive massive growth. (I believe Etsy had a policy of rewrites needing to support current needs multiplied by five. This acknowledges that there's a…

I agree, but the actual words used when this discussion comes up very often are much closer to "What idiot designed this shit?" rather than "My coworkers made architectural choices based on facts that are no longer true". (At Google the latter was perhaps more common, but I've heard the former in startups a lot more frequently, and certainly on Internet message boards.) I'm perspective-taking on the part of all sides; I hope that it's apparent from each side being called an idiot in turn and the company succeeding in the end that I don't actually believe any of the participants are idiots.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#47

Post by braythwayt » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 8:23 PM UTC

msie wrote: post #36

nostrademons wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…

I was nodding so much to this comment. Been there, done that. Been on both sides.

I nodded so vigorously that I need a chiropractor. This perfectly describes my experience in the web industry and the client-server industry before that.

Only the particular languages and frameworks change, but the patterns remain the same.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#48

Post by killface » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 8:37 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #2

Parse never made sense to me. I could see a service like Parse being useful, but it would need to be owned / operated by a nonprofit in order to gain any adoption. Otherwise, it's just another proprietary platform that will get shut off or changed once Facebook (or whoever) pivots to another business model to address that market. There's certainly demand, but I think most developers are wary about putting their compa…

Which is why, when a project presented itself that had this need, we ended up using Apache UserGrid.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#49

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 8:48 PM UTC

volaski wrote: post #41

nostrademons wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't make sense to me until I had a.) started a company and b.) saw the historical tech stacks of a number of companies (eg. Google, Facebook, EBay) that had hit it big. I started my career with the belief that your company has one tech stack, the chief architect chooses it when the company is founded, and that you never ever rewrite it because you're in for a world of pain if you do. I learned that basically no…

i think what the op meant was that it didn't make sense because it's owned by facebook. Heroku being owned by Salesforce makes much more sense because that's their business models are aligned. I remember the first time I was about to try out Parse, fortunately that's around when Parse got acquired by Facebook and I decided not to take a risk. It especially didn't make sense for me because I was going to build a socia…

I'm saying that this usually doesn't matter to the people who would be using Parse anyway, because they operate under a timeline much shorter than this. In a year, their startup will either be dead or they'll have the funding to migrate off Parse. On a timescale equal to your lifetime, it's almost a guarantee that FB will pull the plug on Parse. But on a timescale equal to the time period when you need Parse, it's actually a pretty good bet.

If you had tried out Parse right when they got acquired by FB, chances are you would either have a fundable business that can hire engineers to move to your own infrastructure, or you would know that your business idea doesn't work. Either way, you no longer need Parse.

Similarly, the shutdown mostly affects "zombie" businesses - the ones that aren't dead, but aren't growing either - because in a year, you should be able to figure out whether or not your business concept has legs.

Re: Why did Facebook decide to shut down Parse?

#50

Post by dev360 » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 8:49 PM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #47

msie wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was nodding so much to this comment. Been there, done that. Been on both sides.

I nodded so vigorously that I need a chiropractor. This perfectly describes my experience in the web industry and the client-server industry before that. Only the particular languages and frameworks change, but the patterns remain the same.

By patterns you mean GoF??!