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Personally, for infrastructure level stuff like that and if I was starting from scratch, I would chose Haskell. At the scale of Uber and given that there would

Personally, for infrastructure level stuff like that and if I was starting from scratch, I would chose Haskell. At the scale of Uber and given that there would be a lot of legacy hanging around, I would probably chose to build on top of the kind of scala libraries that twitter has been putting out (which it sounds like from the other article about uber's micro services currently on HN they are doing). The serious statement behind my slightly tongue in cheek remark earlier, was that I don't think either python or node are suitable for building infrastructure type applications that will form the backbone of a constelation of SOA type applications. Round the edges, it's slightly more defensible. However for central infrastructure, I'd rather have rather more foot-bullet barriers than those offer.

nasalgoat 11y ago
Good luck hiring Haskell programmers. If you're really serious you go C or C++, not interpreted languages at all. But that said, plenty of big scale stuff is running on PHP, Python and Ruby. The language matters less than the people using it and the architecture design.
- boothead 11y ago
  Actually, that Haskell developers are hard to hire is one of the biggest myths going. Supply of Haskell developers massively outstrips demand at the moment. In my experience Haskell also neatly address the other two points of people and architecture: the average [0] level of skill of developers in the Haskell community is higher, as is their average level of grit and determination (because of the learning curve). Haskell almost encourages constructing your applications as operations over streams of events (a la event sourcing, unified log etc), which for my money is the best way to think about designing most platform type apps right now. [0] Note: I'm not claiming that all Haskell developers are coding ubermensch, just that the average level of the pool of talent is higher.
- stefanix 11y ago
  Maybe it's the other way around. You have to be extremely serious when your goal is safe C/C++.
  - nasalgoat 11y ago
    Perhaps part of the problem is that these interpreted languages have made programmers lazy.
    - yogthos 11y ago
      Perhaps part of the problem is that a lot of people still don't understand that developer time is one of the biggest costs in developing and maintaining software.

nasalgoat 11y ago

Good luck hiring Haskell programmers. If you're really serious you go C or C++, not interpreted languages at all. But that said, plenty of big scale stuff is running on PHP, Python and Ruby. The language matters less than the people using it and the architecture design.

boothead 11y ago
Actually, that Haskell developers are hard to hire is one of the biggest myths going. Supply of Haskell developers massively outstrips demand at the moment. In my experience Haskell also neatly address the other two points of people and architecture: the average [0] level of skill of developers in the Haskell community is higher, as is their average level of grit and determination (because of the learning curve). Haskell almost encourages constructing your applications as operations over streams of events (a la event sourcing, unified log etc), which for my money is the best way to think about designing most platform type apps right now. [0] Note: I'm not claiming that all Haskell developers are coding ubermensch, just that the average level of the pool of talent is higher.
stefanix 11y ago
Maybe it's the other way around. You have to be extremely serious when your goal is safe C/C++.
- nasalgoat 11y ago
  Perhaps part of the problem is that these interpreted languages have made programmers lazy.
  - yogthos 11y ago
    Perhaps part of the problem is that a lot of people still don't understand that developer time is one of the biggest costs in developing and maintaining software.