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"So when building a new application, it doesn't really make sense to engineer it to be scalable from the ground up; you're probably going to throw it out before
by spopejoy 11y ago
"So when building a new application, it doesn't really make sense to engineer it to be scalable from the ground up; you're probably going to throw it out before you have to worry about scaling ... if it's successful, you can pay someone to deal with the problems later"
Agree. It's important to iterate quickly and get the intent right and not sweat the small stuff, including whatever notion people have of what's "scalable" which usually is misguided if not a fantasy. Scaling is "a good problem to have" after all; it's only necessary if people are actually using your stuff in the large.
Having said that, migrating off of a terrible language is nearly impossible and always painful. Pick stuff with a good runtime -- Java, Go, Haskell, Erlang, C#, whatever -- and you have a chance of scaling if you ever need it.
- lsc 11y agoI was going to argue with you; but look at facebook. They started with PHP... instead of re-writing it in something sane, they wrote a better php runtime. So perhaps you are right. It still seems wrong to me, though; it seems like if you've got several orders of magnitude more resources to build version 2 than you had to build version 1, you could re-do it from the ground up in something... better.