4 ms·

Interesting fact that most people might not know - Jet.com is powered by .NET specifically F#! http://techgroup.jet.com/blog/2015/03-22-on-how-jet-chose/ http:

Interesting fact that most people might not know - Jet.com is powered by .NET specifically F#! http://techgroup.jet.com/blog/2015/03-22-on-how-jet-chose/ http://techgroup.jet.com/blog/2015/03-22-on-how-jet-chose/

melling 11y ago
There was a good discussion about it a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9971412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9971412
p4wnc6 11y ago
There's not much to glean from that link. I'm always excited to hear things like this, and I was very excited to hear that Jet was committing to F#. I'm not a fan of heavy enterprisey dev environments, but F# is a great language. How great it would be if more organizations came out strong for functional programming. But I have heard some about the software hiring practices at Jet and what I've heard makes me highly skeptical that they could actually be using proper functional programming techniques. It's disappointing -- someone using F# because it's vaguely "better C#" -- similar to people using Scala or Clojure because it's "better Java". Sometimes I think they heavy advertisements ("Hey look we're so cool we use functional programming") is more meant to sucker people in under the belief that once the business stabilizes, it will be some sort of Bell Labs of ____ where the company will really try to invest in high-end software solutions and research, and that a lot of it will be carried out with functional programming. But the reality is that it's more of just a hiring tactic and a tech status grab. Maybe you can convince people on the fringe of functional programming to accept less pay for the lure of getting to learn a functional language? Maybe it's worth it if you get on-average higher quality developers because of the affinity for vague association with functional programming? Of course it's possible that they really do use F# and that the overall system has been architected well with functional principles. I don't get that sense from the linked blog post or from the overall progress of their online services.
- ghuntley 11y ago
  Maybe you can convince people on the fringe of functional programming to accept less pay for the lure of getting to learn a functional language? Maybe it's worth it if you get on-average higher quality developers because of the affinity for vague association with functional programming? There's a bunch of quality .NET developers that regularly come to the Sydney F# meetup which would imho defect in a heartbeat. Definate yes on the lure for on-average higher quality developers and potentially yes for less money. Hiring directly from Meetups is the exact strategy Walmart Labs did w/nodejs to obtain quality talent that otherwise would not have considered them (Walmart [has|had] a image problem) - http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-walmart-labs/ http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-...
  - ghuntley 11y ago
    There's also FunctionalJobs (http://functionaljobs.com/ http://functionaljobs.com/) which is a job board specifically for developers that use or want to use functional programming. Browsing the listings you can specifically see which companies that are definitely using niche languages and hiring from meetups as an talent acquisition strategy.
    - p4wnc6 11y ago
      I actually used Functional Jobs to locate a job with an established company that was creating an internal team set to use exclusively a functional language. My experience was not good at all. It turned out that they meant that they had acquired a start-up that made their own proprietary functional language (from scratch, not even building on the parser or lexer or anything from previous languages). The team also said, with a straight face, that they didn't believe in unit testing -- like, they didn't believe that it was even in principle a reasonable thing to do at any time. It really opened my eyes to the fact that when someone claims their team uses "exclusively functional programming" that person actually may not even know what immutability or algebraic data types are. I had always been working on an assumption before that there was a vague correlation between wanting to work with functional techniques and being a quality-minded engineer -- but my experience after getting a job from a place that posted on Functional Jobs totally changed that. I try to be way, way more skeptical now, which is why I am quite skeptical that Jet is using F# more as a hiring trick than as a true engineering ethos.
swingbridge 11y ago
Why anyone would build a startup on the Microsoft stack is beyond me, but there's a lot about jet.com's strategy that I don't understand. For the time being I'll warm up some popcorn and watch in amusement as they blow through their investors' wads of cash.
- smt88 11y ago
  I used to feel the same way, but F# is actually a well-respected language, and (if you have the funding to pay for it) having enterprise support is pretty huge for a small company. Microsoft has also recently open-sourced a lot of their stack and made their dev products free. At the very least, you know that Microsoft products are going to be rock-solid (since they power so many massive companies).
- ghuntley 11y ago
  Why? How about $600k of free hosting via Azure vs $100k w/AWS in the early days and a large market to hire talent from as you need to grow? You don't even need to be running .NET or Windows - whatever language/operating-system floats your boat. Who? Well here's some pretty amazing global startups based out of Sydney, Australia that use .NET: - http://campaignmonitor.com/ http://campaignmonitor.com/ - http://rokt.com http://rokt.com - http://invoice.2go.com/ http://invoice.2go.com/ - http://ansarada.com http://ansarada.com - http://gofundraise.com.au/ http://gofundraise.com.au/ - http://ozforex.com.au/ http://ozforex.com.au/ - http://sphealth.com/ http://sphealth.com/ If I've left a company out, please share!
  - latch 11y ago
    I agree with your parent. The ecosystem on *nix is larger, more robust and cheaper. There's just so many more tools around that you'll end up running a mix-environment, which is obviously not ideal (but certainly not impossible).
    - ghuntley 11y ago
      I'm a UNIX guy at heart actually that works in an mixed-environment. Don't completely agree w/comment about mixed-environment being undesirable - most shops are heading down this path anyway of anything goes with the micro-services route. Completely agree with you on tooling, things are getting better in this department namely http://octopus.com/ http://octopus.com/ && http://getseq.net/ http://getseq.net/ which funny enough are also Aussie. My main concern re: .NET are the attitudes of companies and software developers that use the technology generally are anti open-source by default. That does however make it very easy to become noticeable from an employment perspective vs the nodejs/ruby/python/java community.
ljoshua 11y ago
And Scott Hanselman did a good interview with Rachel Reese from Jet about it just a couple of shows ago as well: http://hanselminutes.com/494/jetcom-scales-with-azure-f-and-more-with-rachel-reese http://hanselminutes.com/494/jetcom-scales-with-azure-f-and-...
- partisan 11y ago
  Looking forward to hearing her speak on a few related topics at this weekend's Code Camp NYC.
aioprisan 11y ago
For the backend, perhaps, but frontend is all Angular with Mustache for templating

melling 11y ago

There was a good discussion about it a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9971412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9971412

p4wnc6 11y ago

There's not much to glean from that link. I'm always excited to hear things like this, and I was very excited to hear that Jet was committing to F#. I'm not a fan of heavy enterprisey dev environments, but F# is a great language. How great it would be if more organizations came out strong for functional programming. But I have heard some about the software hiring practices at Jet and what I've heard makes me highly skeptical that they could actually be using proper functional programming techniques. It's disappointing -- someone using F# because it's vaguely "better C#" -- similar to people using Scala or Clojure because it's "better Java". Sometimes I think they heavy advertisements ("Hey look we're so cool we use functional programming") is more meant to sucker people in under the belief that once the business stabilizes, it will be some sort of Bell Labs of ____ where the company will really try to invest in high-end software solutions and research, and that a lot of it will be carried out with functional programming. But the reality is that it's more of just a hiring tactic and a tech status grab. Maybe you can convince people on the fringe of functional programming to accept less pay for the lure of getting to learn a functional language? Maybe it's worth it if you get on-average higher quality developers because of the affinity for vague association with functional programming? Of course it's possible that they really do use F# and that the overall system has been architected well with functional principles. I don't get that sense from the linked blog post or from the overall progress of their online services.

ghuntley 11y ago
Maybe you can convince people on the fringe of functional programming to accept less pay for the lure of getting to learn a functional language? Maybe it's worth it if you get on-average higher quality developers because of the affinity for vague association with functional programming? There's a bunch of quality .NET developers that regularly come to the Sydney F# meetup which would imho defect in a heartbeat. Definate yes on the lure for on-average higher quality developers and potentially yes for less money. Hiring directly from Meetups is the exact strategy Walmart Labs did w/nodejs to obtain quality talent that otherwise would not have considered them (Walmart [has|had] a image problem) - http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-walmart-labs/ http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-...
- ghuntley 11y ago
  There's also FunctionalJobs (http://functionaljobs.com/ http://functionaljobs.com/) which is a job board specifically for developers that use or want to use functional programming. Browsing the listings you can specifically see which companies that are definitely using niche languages and hiring from meetups as an talent acquisition strategy.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    I actually used Functional Jobs to locate a job with an established company that was creating an internal team set to use exclusively a functional language. My experience was not good at all. It turned out that they meant that they had acquired a start-up that made their own proprietary functional language (from scratch, not even building on the parser or lexer or anything from previous languages). The team also said, with a straight face, that they didn't believe in unit testing -- like, they didn't believe that it was even in principle a reasonable thing to do at any time. It really opened my eyes to the fact that when someone claims their team uses "exclusively functional programming" that person actually may not even know what immutability or algebraic data types are. I had always been working on an assumption before that there was a vague correlation between wanting to work with functional techniques and being a quality-minded engineer -- but my experience after getting a job from a place that posted on Functional Jobs totally changed that. I try to be way, way more skeptical now, which is why I am quite skeptical that Jet is using F# more as a hiring trick than as a true engineering ethos.

swingbridge 11y ago

Why anyone would build a startup on the Microsoft stack is beyond me, but there's a lot about jet.com's strategy that I don't understand. For the time being I'll warm up some popcorn and watch in amusement as they blow through their investors' wads of cash.

smt88 11y ago
I used to feel the same way, but F# is actually a well-respected language, and (if you have the funding to pay for it) having enterprise support is pretty huge for a small company. Microsoft has also recently open-sourced a lot of their stack and made their dev products free. At the very least, you know that Microsoft products are going to be rock-solid (since they power so many massive companies).
ghuntley 11y ago
Why? How about $600k of free hosting via Azure vs $100k w/AWS in the early days and a large market to hire talent from as you need to grow? You don't even need to be running .NET or Windows - whatever language/operating-system floats your boat. Who? Well here's some pretty amazing global startups based out of Sydney, Australia that use .NET: - http://campaignmonitor.com/ http://campaignmonitor.com/ - http://rokt.com http://rokt.com - http://invoice.2go.com/ http://invoice.2go.com/ - http://ansarada.com http://ansarada.com - http://gofundraise.com.au/ http://gofundraise.com.au/ - http://ozforex.com.au/ http://ozforex.com.au/ - http://sphealth.com/ http://sphealth.com/ If I've left a company out, please share!
- latch 11y ago
  I agree with your parent. The ecosystem on *nix is larger, more robust and cheaper. There's just so many more tools around that you'll end up running a mix-environment, which is obviously not ideal (but certainly not impossible).
  - ghuntley 11y ago
    I'm a UNIX guy at heart actually that works in an mixed-environment. Don't completely agree w/comment about mixed-environment being undesirable - most shops are heading down this path anyway of anything goes with the micro-services route. Completely agree with you on tooling, things are getting better in this department namely http://octopus.com/ http://octopus.com/ && http://getseq.net/ http://getseq.net/ which funny enough are also Aussie. My main concern re: .NET are the attitudes of companies and software developers that use the technology generally are anti open-source by default. That does however make it very easy to become noticeable from an employment perspective vs the nodejs/ruby/python/java community.

ljoshua 11y ago

And Scott Hanselman did a good interview with Rachel Reese from Jet about it just a couple of shows ago as well: http://hanselminutes.com/494/jetcom-scales-with-azure-f-and-more-with-rachel-reese http://hanselminutes.com/494/jetcom-scales-with-azure-f-and-...

partisan 11y ago
Looking forward to hearing her speak on a few related topics at this weekend's Code Camp NYC.

aioprisan 11y ago

For the backend, perhaps, but frontend is all Angular with Mustache for templating