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…
Obvious flame bait. Please don't post this garbage on HN.
Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move
71–80 of 179 posts
Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move
#72What 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…
Python's culture heavily encourages explicit, consistent code while Ruby's culture is a lot more flexible in that respect. Rails makes many assumptions by default and has an API that is based on clever coding for the sake of maximizing productivity. That stuff would likely not fly in the Python community.
Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move
#73It's interesting that when it comes time to scale to serve enormous loads, you have to be willing to change fundamental parts of your stack which you've made a huge investment in. Ruby holds up well enough on the majority of the sites that use it, but when you have traffic the size that Twitter does, it's just not good enough. And it turns out that Java provides a nice tradeoff with high performance and high-level co…
"Python is fast enough for our site and allows us to produce maintainable features in record times, with a minimum of developers," said Cuong Do, Software Architect, YouTube.com. There are many dynamic user driven sites which have scaled well (far less downtime than Twitter) without switching to static compilation.
You can argue that YouTube is less dynamic than Twitter.
When a user posts a message on Twitter, that message has to be pushed to all the users that follow that user and so every user has a personalized stream of incoming tweets that has to be updated, not in realtime, but with small latency nonetheless.
Also, Twitter doesn't have Google's infrastructure.
In regards to "static compilation", that's not the important bit, but rather the performance of the virtual machine. The JVM, at its core, is not working with static types. The bytecode itself is free of static types, except for when you want to invoke a method, in which case you need a concrete name for the type for which you invoke that method ... this is because the actual method that gets called is not known, being dispatched based on "this", so you need some kind of lookup strategy and therefore the conventions that Java uses for that lookup are hardcoded in the bytecode. However, invokeDynamic from JDK 7 allows the developer to override that lookup strategy, allowing one complete dynamic freedom at the bytecode level, with good performance characteristics.
The real issue is the JVM versus the reference implementations of Ruby/Python. The JVM is the most advanced mainstream VM (for server-side loads at least).
Unfortunately for Facebook, they didn't have a Charles Oliver Nutter to implement a kickass PHP implementation on top of the JVM - not that it's something feasible, because PHP as a language depends a lot on a multitude of C-based extensions. The more pure a language is (in common usage), the easier it is to port to other platforms. Alternative Python implementations (read Jython, IronPython) have failed because if you want to port Python, you also have to port popular libraries such as NumPy. Which is why the PyPy project is allocating good resources towards that, because otherwise nobody would use it.
Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move
#74This is a stupid article
Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move
#75The 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.
I do not think the continuum of language can be mapped along one dimension when considering individuals. Constant development of languages, patterns, and idioms are global manifestations of individual frustrations.
Ideally, every person would have their own programming language (or culture), grown from their own personal experiences and desires. In that case, a qualifier for a good language is one that most easily allows expression of new languages or cultures at the individual level.
For a language designer, this could be an impossible problem due to the unique learning models of each individual. Their best hope may be in attracting those whose mental models have some overlap with their own.
Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Python is fast enough for our site and allows us to produce maintainable features in record times, with a minimum of developers," said Cuong Do, Software Architect, YouTube.com. There are many dynamic user driven sites which have scaled well (far less downtime than Twitter) without switching to static compilation.
You can argue that YouTube is less dynamic than Twitter. When a user posts a message on Twitter, that message has to be pushed to all the users that follow that user and so every user has a personalized stream of incoming tweets that has to be updated, not in realtime, but with small latency nonetheless. Also, Twitter doesn't have Google's infrastructure. In regards to "static compilation", that's not the important b…
I don't think pushing tweets to every user is a scalable approach. It would seem more sensible to read rather than push tweets associated with a user. I don't know about Twitter's infrastructure, but storing more than 1 copy of the same data wouldn't make that much sense.
Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move
#77What 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…
Python has a roughly equivalent MVC web framework called Django. Ruby and Python as languages are not radically different in kind, but their respective developer communities have had different focuses, and as a consequence the library of tools are not identical. Ruby on Rails became popular because people were dissatisfied with the way that web development was being done, and DHH is very good at marketing/propaganda.…
This is spot on.
To elaborate a bit, Rails tended to have a lot more generated code (the fabled "magic") that really sped up development of your standard CRUD apps. As far as I can tell, this was fairly novel in web development. Django didn't really have a focus on that, you spent a little (lot?) more time configuring. It's better now though.
Of course, at the complete opposite of the spectrum, you have very minimalist stuff like Flask (Python) or Sinatra (Ruby) which is doesn't include a lot of bells and whistles. You'll have to import your own ORM, templating, etc...
Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move
#78This is why I insist people to work on a robust stack from ground up, so it will be less painful in the long run. This is not to say that you shouldn't build a prototype in Rails to get everything up and running as quickly as possible and worry about scaling later, but, it is just my opinion that if you invest the time and effort in working with a robust stack (for example Scala+Lift), your investment will pay you off in the long run.
I've always admired rails for its flexibility and its enormous productivity boost, but all my serious applications are coded in Lift. I for one believe in "develop and forget", because I'd like to call myself a business guy than a programmer, though I'm deep into both. I like to spend more time expanding/marketing my business than worry about scaling it. But that's just my perspective.
JVM is terribly under-estimated and I realized this when I got started with Lift+Scala. Scala is a very powerful language and requires a totally different mindset (=functional). And Lift is fairly complex for those wishing to get started with it and has poor documentation, despite being a 5-year old Framework. But once you understand it fully (somehow), there's no looking back. Lift provides so many things out of the box, especially related to security (unlike PLay!), so it's kind of a trade-off you have to choose between. Even if you compare all the benchmarks, most of the JVM-based languages like Scala outperform even something like GO! (Ok, that's not fair, since GO is fairly new)
If you're interested in Scala, Coursera has a course on it by the creator of Scala himself (Martin Odersky).
Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
They used Scala, not Java, on JVM.
They use both. "Last week, we launched a replacement for our Ruby-on-Rails front-end: a Java server we call Blender. We are pleased to announce that this change has produced a 3x drop in search latencies and will enable us to rapidly iterate on search features in the coming months." http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/04/twitter-search-is-now...
At the same time they did that, they replaced MySQL with a real-time version of Lucene.
Almost every one of these "we switched from A to B and got a 3x speed increase" articles conflates a lot of different variables. The first version you build when you have no traffic and product/market fit is the most important thing. Performance is a low priority. Eventually it hits a bottleneck and you begin to look at performance. Perhaps there is another language out there that is faster than the one you're using. At this point nobody says "let's do an exact code translation from A to B". As you rewrite, you keep a constant eye on performance. It often involves ripping out abstractions and moving closer to the metal. The system you end up with usually looks nothing like the one you started out with, nor should it since it is the product of all of your experience scaling up to that point.
Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Python is fast enough for our site and allows us to produce maintainable features in record times, with a minimum of developers," said Cuong Do, Software Architect, YouTube.com. There are many dynamic user driven sites which have scaled well (far less downtime than Twitter) without switching to static compilation.
You can argue that YouTube is less dynamic than Twitter. When a user posts a message on Twitter, that message has to be pushed to all the users that follow that user and so every user has a personalized stream of incoming tweets that has to be updated, not in realtime, but with small latency nonetheless. Also, Twitter doesn't have Google's infrastructure. In regards to "static compilation", that's not the important b…
When a user posts a video it gets published in the subscription feed of every user subscribed(maybe not with the ajax like twitter does); plus they tell you which videos have you already watched. Plus the search feature is probably more used than in Twitter.