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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

#81

Post by DASD »

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.

Indeed they are not similar but wildly different tools are often used in a similar or competing use cases(eg. the blog's post of the company using Ruby and conversion to Go). I had asked because if you were to reverse the usage do you think Google is likely using much Rust since it is developing Go?

Just to clarify, I see a bright future for both languages.

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

#82

Post by kevingadd »

pjscott wrote: post #78
zobzu wrote: post #41

It's not really "go" that makes the difference. it's how the runtimes and frameworks are used and/or made. frameworks on top of frameworks, all being over engineered, with poor understanding of what the system actually does, result in super slow apps on top, that you generally go to aws to scale. It's not the first time that I see people reducing a dozen servers that were "always maxed out" by a couple of servers "th…

Nice rant, and I mostly agree with it, but there are a few slow things about the ways that some languages are usually implemented that don't really have much to do with over-engineering. Let's take this line of Python code, for example, and look at how the CPython interpreter runs it: return x + 42 This turns into the following bytecode instructions: LOAD_FAST 0 (x) LOAD_CONST 1 (42) BINARY_ADD RETURN_VALUE First we…

A more interesting comparison would be the PyPy-generated native code for the expression versus the compiled code from Go. Comparing an interpreter with a compiler is generally uninteresting; the compiler almost always wins.

If you look at the code that comes out of various modern JITs you often will find really interesting differences in the native code they produce, even for simple constructs like arithmetic. Type checks, barriers, bailouts, etc - in addition to more mundane differences, like one using SSE to do floating point and the other using x87, and one JIT having a better register allocator.

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

#83

Post by MBCook »

TillE wrote: post #30
shurcooL wrote: post #20

> "We also weren't sure if we would be able hire top talent if we chose Go, but we soon found out that we could get top talent because we chose Go." I feel[1] that a smart/talented C/C++/anything developer can go from someone who has never seen or heard of golang to a proficient and productive Go developer in a matter of a few weeks, maybe even _days_, if not less. That's how long it takes to go through the following…

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.

> 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 experience, but can they convert that to Java or have they just been doing cargo-cult stuff? This would be a smaller issue with something like C# that's closer to Java.

Second, and I suspect more common, is time investment. It might take someone quite a bit of time to switch languages. If they haven't done it before, you might find out it's a weakness for them. In my experience, at least in smaller companies, the fact that you're hiring means you need someone now. That extra time could be killer, because you waited to long to start hiring.

I would at least expect candidates to look into what we're using. When I changed jobs 2 years ago, one place I applied was a Python shop. I've never used Python professionally, but I've tinkered with it. If you're applying for a Java position, I expect you to have at least looked at Java before the interview. Sadly, I bet that would happen a non-trivial number of times.

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

#84

Post by genwin »

shurcooL wrote: post #20

> "We also weren't sure if we would be able hire top talent if we chose Go, but we soon found out that we could get top talent because we chose Go." I feel[1] that a smart/talented C/C++/anything developer can go from someone who has never seen or heard of golang to a proficient and productive Go developer in a matter of a few weeks, maybe even _days_, if not less. That's how long it takes to go through the following…

> I feel[1] that a smart/talented C/C++/anything developer can go from someone who has never seen or heard of golang to a proficient and productive Go developer in a matter of a few weeks, maybe even _days_, if not less.

Agreed! My career is mostly database development. Very high level. Yet I felt comfortable in Go in a few weeks. In a few months I was handling low-level stuff (to me, anyway) like tweaking Go's web server. Go's official online documentation is excellent, although I wish it had lots more examples. The next best learning resource I have on it is the book Programming in Go (also get the Go Programming Language Phrasebook).

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

jbooth wrote: post #73
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…

Go has first-class functions, so you could write a library do the same thing with, yes, a few more declarations around it. In your example, .map { |i| i + 9 } is .map( func(i int) int { return i + 9 }), or .map(myFuncDefinedElsewhere) in most real-world scenarios. As a commenter upthread pointed out, Go and serverside Javascript are aimed at very different use cases and audiences.

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by quaunaut »

zobzu wrote: post #41

It's not really "go" that makes the difference. it's how the runtimes and frameworks are used and/or made. frameworks on top of frameworks, all being over engineered, with poor understanding of what the system actually does, result in super slow apps on top, that you generally go to aws to scale. It's not the first time that I see people reducing a dozen servers that were "always maxed out" by a couple of servers "th…

Maybe I'm just a new and terrible programmer, but I feel like if you wait to fully understand whatever tech is out there in terms of what to use, you'll never get started.

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

#87

Post by anthonyb »

TillE wrote: post #30
shurcooL wrote: post #20

> "We also weren't sure if we would be able hire top talent if we chose Go, but we soon found out that we could get top talent because we chose Go." I feel[1] that a smart/talented C/C++/anything developer can go from someone who has never seen or heard of golang to a proficient and productive Go developer in a matter of a few weeks, maybe even _days_, if not less. That's how long it takes to go through the following…

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.

If you're looking for a good programmer, it often pays to be looking for one in a niche language. Paul Graham referred to this as the Python paradox: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

(The inverse of this is if you're looking for a PHP programmer, and posting ads on monster.com ;) )

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

#88

Post by beatgammit »

TillE wrote: post #30
shurcooL wrote: post #20

> "We also weren't sure if we would be able hire top talent if we chose Go, but we soon found out that we could get top talent because we chose Go." I feel[1] that a smart/talented C/C++/anything developer can go from someone who has never seen or heard of golang to a proficient and productive Go developer in a matter of a few weeks, maybe even _days_, if not less. That's how long it takes to go through the following…

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.

I agree that any serious programmer should be able to be productive in any language, but mastery of a style of programming takes time.

It's easy to move about in the same style of programming, but trying to move someone from enterprise-y OO (Java, C#) to functional (Haskell, Lisp) or even Go is a bit of a leap. Concepts often just don't cross over. A Go channel, for example, makes sense to an Erlang developer, but not a Java developer. Goroutines don't make sense to someone familiar with traditional threads.

There's a certain amount of rewiring that needs to be done. Looking for a "[language] programmer" is strange, but looking for someone proficient in the style of programming used makes sense to me.

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

#89

Post by steveklabnik »

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.

The Rust team agrees: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-language-FAQ (control-f for 'this Google language')
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