Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#41

Post by 46Bit » Thu, Nov 08, 2012, 6:44 AM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #22

While I can agree that scala/java/jvm deserve some credit for this (typing, concurrency support), I think stories like this do a disservice in that they underestimate the importance of building a system a second time with all the lessons learned the first time around. This is not unlike those stories where a developer writes a trivial program in a new language that is similar to a trivial program they wrote in anothe…

Very true. Twitter may have had a lot of scaling trouble, but that didn't necessarily mean moving everything onto the JVM was necessary to 'make it scale'. It was just sensible to pick a language that would prevent problems in future.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#42

Post by willvarfar » Thu, Nov 08, 2012, 6:45 AM UTC

nnq wrote: post #28

...I never get it why scaling is seen as such a "hot" problem and everybody seems inclined to make language and technology choices based on it ...I bet Twitter could have scaled well keeping Ruby and rewriting performance critical parts in C and maybe keep tweaking and tuning the Ruby interpreter, much along the way the Youtube team did with Python and C and now some Go I hear... I think their decision was more influ…

Did you skip the bit in the article where they mentioned the faster Ruby VM they built, before moving to JVM?

http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/03/building-faster-ruby-...

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#43

Post by 46Bit » Thu, Nov 08, 2012, 6:47 AM UTC

eta_carinae wrote: post #2

The rumors of Java's death are, indeed, greatly exaggerated.

Java isn't sexy any more. You use Java because your problems are, and so it doesn't matter to anyone.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#44

Post by anonymous » Thu, Nov 08, 2012, 6:48 AM UTC

cpt1138 wrote: post #10

Ive heard that Java is DSL for turning large blocks of XML into stack traces. But it does it fast and reliably.

Hah. I'd put it more like: Java is a platform for building frameworks for implementing interpreters for XML-based DSLs.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#45

Post by knowtheory » Thu, Nov 08, 2012, 6:48 AM UTC

wmil wrote: post #31

pyrotechnick wrote: post #7

This move marks the beginning of the end of a four year long effort for Twitter to rid themselves of Ruby. History will remember the entire Ruby industry as a series of compounding failures. The de facto formalisation and specifications. The black-box behaviour of core development. The broken-linked, un-versioned docs. The rampant cargo-cult mentality. The arcane exceptions. The meta-frameworks. Gem hell. 1.9/2.0 Rai…

> Gem hell. Is this really a problem? Every package/dependency manager seems to blow up on occasion. Gems haven't given me the problems that I've had with Pip/CPAN/Autoconf.

It's enough of a problem that bundler was written. Of course Bundler sorts the problem out pretty well so... Hell averted :P

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#46

Post by pyrotechnick » Thu, Nov 08, 2012, 6:48 AM UTC

knowtheory wrote: post #29

foz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> History will remember the entire Ruby industry as a series of compounding failures. This is a bit dramatic. Despite its faults, the language and community around it have been quite a success story. It's had a huge and positive influence on the web development world.

It's also worth rebutting douchebag trolling with the Ruby community's actual merits. The Ruby community, really really cares about developer tooling and teaching others. Ruby is also one of the nice places where object oriented programming touches metaprogramming. Don't forget that a lot of sysadmin work is done in Ruby now. Both Puppet and Chef are written in Ruby, and that Github and Heroku both came up out of the…

argumentum ad novitam

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#47

Post by philwelch » Thu, Nov 08, 2012, 6:49 AM UTC

SiVal wrote: post #32

What this says to me, a non-RoR user, is that it's harder to build websites with Java than with RoR, but if you pass a certain (very unusual) level of traffic, you'll wish you'd made the extra effort; otherwise, you'll be glad you didn't. (Extra effort isn't free.) Fine, but what I wish I understood was why RoR is so popular to begin with. The claim is always that Rails is so wonderful that it's worth learning Ruby j…

You're making it sound like Ruby is a terrible language that's either much worse than Python or completely redundant with it. I simply don't think that's the case.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#48

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 08, 2012, 6:50 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #37

kevinconroy wrote: post #6

The novice programmer says: "My language is better than yours." The wise programmer says: "Use the right tool for the job." Please HN, we're wiser than trending stories would suggest.

Do you think it's impossible for one language to be better than another? If so, it's impossible for a language designer to do a good job, because it's impossible to improve a programming language.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#49

Post by nnq » Thu, Nov 08, 2012, 6:50 AM UTC

willvarfar wrote: post #42

nnq wrote: post #28

...I never get it why scaling is seen as such a "hot" problem and everybody seems inclined to make language and technology choices based on it ...I bet Twitter could have scaled well keeping Ruby and rewriting performance critical parts in C and maybe keep tweaking and tuning the Ruby interpreter, much along the way the Youtube team did with Python and C and now some Go I hear... I think their decision was more influ…

Did you skip the bit in the article where they mentioned the faster Ruby VM they built, before moving to JVM? http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/03/building-faster-ruby-...

no, I didn't skip it, and I can only guess that either they considered they wasted to many resources for such a "small" performance gain or didn't have people with enough skill in the right areas to keep going this direction. But no, I don't know all the details and steps of Twitter's switch and my experience is in the Python ecosystem but I think lots of things are similar...

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#50

Post by philwelch » Thu, Nov 08, 2012, 6:52 AM UTC

verroq wrote: post #24

kevinconroy wrote: post #6

The novice programmer says: "My language is better than yours." The wise programmer says: "Use the right tool for the job." Please HN, we're wiser than trending stories would suggest.

The wise programmer rewrites his stack in another language to scale right?

If your software is Twitter, then you're constantly rewriting the stack anyway just to keep up, and switching to different languages, frameworks, technologies, and tools component-by-component is often the best way to do that.