9 ms·

This post makes the assumption that MongoDB isn't doing well based on Hacker News. MongoDB the company, and product, are doing extremely well (outside of anecdo

This post makes the assumption that MongoDB isn't doing well based on Hacker News. MongoDB the company, and product, are doing extremely well (outside of anecdotal Hacker News posts), based on objective metrics like downloads, skills, jobs, and company revenue (and the company is nearing 900 employees on linkedin). To put it another way, RethinkDB did extremely well on Hacker News. Twitter didn't, if you remember all the negative posts (and still went public). There is little relation between success on Hacker News and company success.

__jal 9y ago
Can't speak to current popularity, but I think the overall critique is spot on. It became really popular riding a combination of up-front friendliness and the No-SQL hype bubble. The next morning, a lot of folks started feeling the hangover, whether from actual problems with Mongo or a realization that they did, in fact, need a relational DB. To be clear, I've only ever run it as support for something else that depended on it. It just isn't well-suited to my projects and it wasn't interesting enough to invest much more than noodling a bit with it. I'm sure it is a fine product that turned in to a victim of its own hype. It does serve as a decent example for the next generation of developers about how flavor-of-the-month trends in tech make people do stupid things, like decide they don't actually need ACID for handling money.
owebmaster 9y ago
MongoDB is like the PHP of databases. I started programming PHP and currently I bash it every time I can, because it is a terrible language. But it is easy to start and do cool stuff, just like mongodb. Initial traction is more important than initial architecture, I guess.
- mattacular 9y ago
  Why is PHP a terrible language? It powers a vast part of the internet including sites huge, tiny, and everything in between. It's in vogue to hate on PHP especially here on HN. Language hate based on some sort of popularity contest is silly and language snobbery wont be tolerated at any company worth its salt (read: NOT most startups)
  - threepipeproblm 9y ago
    This lack of insight is why PHP developers have lower average salaries than non-PHP developers. If you think PHP is looked down on by those who care about language features because of a popularity context, rather than because of asinine language decisions and limited support for modern programming paradigms, I think it's you who is missing it. Since any program can technically be written in any (Turing Complete) language, the fact that some big sites were made to work with PHP also sort of misses the point. When most of the big "success stories" adopted PHP, options for web-friendly open source languages were much thinner. Now if you look at the new development projects they highlight, you don't see PHP come up that much. Facebook, for example, is prominently using Haskell. I don't know anyone who both programs in Haskell and is willing to touch PHP. Of course, many thoughtful criticisms of PHP have been discussed on HN. e.g. https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ & http://poincare101.blogspot.com/2011/11/php-sucks-but-some-frameworks-dont.html http://poincare101.blogspot.com/2011/11/php-sucks-but-some-f....
    - sandrob57 9y ago
      You're not wrong, but those articles are 5+ years old and PHP has changed A LOT in recent years — especially since the release of v7. Still, that's not going to do much to change public perception, and I guess that's somewhat fair. PHP has earned it's reputation, even if many (but not all) criticism are now largely dated. I'm just happy I switched to working on other languages, aside from the occasional Laravel-based side projects.
      - threepipeproblm 9y ago
        Thanks, that is absolutely worth pointing out. But there is only so much you can do to fix languages when they are designed with problems initially and you want to keep old programs working. I have the same concerns about ES6 BTW, although JavaScript foundations are arguably less flawed overall (excepting a few areas that are just bat shit crazy). Is public perception the reason you are happy to be mostly using something else now, though?
- betenoire 9y ago
  What? Cuz it "sucks"? We all hate PHP, but it works as advertised. I don't agree with the comparison.
  - ADefenestrator 9y ago
    These days MongoDB more or less (finally) works as advertised as well. It actually has worthwhile backend options (plural!) and the new (v1 vs v0) replication protocol is actually correct. Eight or so years of development has led to the most egregious of the bugs and corner cases being rounded off. So, it started as a shitshow on the back-end and people who had to maintain systems based on it hated it, but it got popular because it was easy to get simple systems up and running with. Then, over time, it slowly became less awful as it was substantially rewritten and large portions of it redesigned. I'd say PHP is a very, very good comparison.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jackweirdy 9y ago
  Right; Facebook, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap - all serious tech stacks that started and (in the case of the last two) continue to use PHP. Reminds me of: https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329 https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329
  - foepys 9y ago
    Well, Facebook and Wikipedia are using HHVM to execute their PHP code, so at least those two are not really satisfied with PHP. I bet they'd like to rewrite their code in a faster, more memory-efficient, language but are hindered by the complexity of their code base.
  - ergo14 9y ago
    Facebook does not "normal" PHP that much, they use host of languages, including Hack, erlang and lots of Python.
    - jackweirdy 9y ago
      Right. That's why I said "Started With".
    - urethrafranklin 9y ago
      Most of their code is Hack, and Hack is a superset of PHP (last time I checked all it really adds is static typing and async) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659729
      - ergo14 9y ago
        > all it really adds is static typing and async You make that sound like its not a big deal vs vanilla php.
        urethrafranklin 9y ago
        It's really not. All the sadness and broken-ness of PHP is still there.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mbesto 9y ago
> objective metrics like downloads, skills, jobs, and company revenue Downloads can be repeats, no? How to discern real number of productive installs? Skills aren't objective, are they? Revenue, great...but they won't disclose it.
Pigo 9y ago
I understand the importance of well thought out back-end architecture, and that it isn't my realm. I just have to say that I really enjoy building things in the MEAN stack, and had fun learning MongoDB. For a long time all I had ever done was relational, but then my company started using Azure table storage for a lot of projects and I became familiar with other models. Then I discovered Mongo while catching up on Angular, and enjoyed using it with the mostly small apps and prototypes I build. I don't know it well enough to try and support it's use on a large scale. After seeing how poorly designed the data is for so many companies out there, it's not a surprise to hear poor choices were made (and probably some poor execution).
irrational 9y ago
I don't know. I was just in a meeting where a team announced that they would need a ton of money and time to move off of MongoDB. The VP reminded them of when they had chosen to move to MongoDB years ago and asked them what happened to all of their promises about how great MongoDB would be. They responded that the promise of MongoDB and the reality are very different and MongoDB has turned out to be a disaster.
threepipeproblm 9y ago
But MongoDB's own cite cites Indeed.com Job Trends data only through 2012, on the basis that Mongo's growth is a reason to use it. Current Indeed.com Job Trends data actually show better numbers than the 2102 stats, but nonetheless show MongoDB jobs in decline. https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-MongoDB.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-MongoDB.html

__jal 9y ago

Can't speak to current popularity, but I think the overall critique is spot on. It became really popular riding a combination of up-front friendliness and the No-SQL hype bubble. The next morning, a lot of folks started feeling the hangover, whether from actual problems with Mongo or a realization that they did, in fact, need a relational DB. To be clear, I've only ever run it as support for something else that depended on it. It just isn't well-suited to my projects and it wasn't interesting enough to invest much more than noodling a bit with it. I'm sure it is a fine product that turned in to a victim of its own hype. It does serve as a decent example for the next generation of developers about how flavor-of-the-month trends in tech make people do stupid things, like decide they don't actually need ACID for handling money.

owebmaster 9y ago

MongoDB is like the PHP of databases. I started programming PHP and currently I bash it every time I can, because it is a terrible language. But it is easy to start and do cool stuff, just like mongodb. Initial traction is more important than initial architecture, I guess.

mattacular 9y ago
Why is PHP a terrible language? It powers a vast part of the internet including sites huge, tiny, and everything in between. It's in vogue to hate on PHP especially here on HN. Language hate based on some sort of popularity contest is silly and language snobbery wont be tolerated at any company worth its salt (read: NOT most startups)
- threepipeproblm 9y ago
  This lack of insight is why PHP developers have lower average salaries than non-PHP developers. If you think PHP is looked down on by those who care about language features because of a popularity context, rather than because of asinine language decisions and limited support for modern programming paradigms, I think it's you who is missing it. Since any program can technically be written in any (Turing Complete) language, the fact that some big sites were made to work with PHP also sort of misses the point. When most of the big "success stories" adopted PHP, options for web-friendly open source languages were much thinner. Now if you look at the new development projects they highlight, you don't see PHP come up that much. Facebook, for example, is prominently using Haskell. I don't know anyone who both programs in Haskell and is willing to touch PHP. Of course, many thoughtful criticisms of PHP have been discussed on HN. e.g. https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ & http://poincare101.blogspot.com/2011/11/php-sucks-but-some-frameworks-dont.html http://poincare101.blogspot.com/2011/11/php-sucks-but-some-f....
  - sandrob57 9y ago
    You're not wrong, but those articles are 5+ years old and PHP has changed A LOT in recent years — especially since the release of v7. Still, that's not going to do much to change public perception, and I guess that's somewhat fair. PHP has earned it's reputation, even if many (but not all) criticism are now largely dated. I'm just happy I switched to working on other languages, aside from the occasional Laravel-based side projects.
    - threepipeproblm 9y ago
      Thanks, that is absolutely worth pointing out. But there is only so much you can do to fix languages when they are designed with problems initially and you want to keep old programs working. I have the same concerns about ES6 BTW, although JavaScript foundations are arguably less flawed overall (excepting a few areas that are just bat shit crazy). Is public perception the reason you are happy to be mostly using something else now, though?
betenoire 9y ago
What? Cuz it "sucks"? We all hate PHP, but it works as advertised. I don't agree with the comparison.
- ADefenestrator 9y ago
  These days MongoDB more or less (finally) works as advertised as well. It actually has worthwhile backend options (plural!) and the new (v1 vs v0) replication protocol is actually correct. Eight or so years of development has led to the most egregious of the bugs and corner cases being rounded off. So, it started as a shitshow on the back-end and people who had to maintain systems based on it hated it, but it got popular because it was easy to get simple systems up and running with. Then, over time, it slowly became less awful as it was substantially rewritten and large portions of it redesigned. I'd say PHP is a very, very good comparison.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jackweirdy 9y ago
Right; Facebook, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap - all serious tech stacks that started and (in the case of the last two) continue to use PHP. Reminds me of: https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329 https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329
- foepys 9y ago
  Well, Facebook and Wikipedia are using HHVM to execute their PHP code, so at least those two are not really satisfied with PHP. I bet they'd like to rewrite their code in a faster, more memory-efficient, language but are hindered by the complexity of their code base.
- ergo14 9y ago
  Facebook does not "normal" PHP that much, they use host of languages, including Hack, erlang and lots of Python.
  - jackweirdy 9y ago
    Right. That's why I said "Started With".
  - urethrafranklin 9y ago
    Most of their code is Hack, and Hack is a superset of PHP (last time I checked all it really adds is static typing and async) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659729
    - ergo14 9y ago
      > all it really adds is static typing and async You make that sound like its not a big deal vs vanilla php.
      - urethrafranklin 9y ago
        It's really not. All the sadness and broken-ness of PHP is still there.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mbesto 9y ago

> objective metrics like downloads, skills, jobs, and company revenue Downloads can be repeats, no? How to discern real number of productive installs? Skills aren't objective, are they? Revenue, great...but they won't disclose it.

Pigo 9y ago

I understand the importance of well thought out back-end architecture, and that it isn't my realm. I just have to say that I really enjoy building things in the MEAN stack, and had fun learning MongoDB. For a long time all I had ever done was relational, but then my company started using Azure table storage for a lot of projects and I became familiar with other models. Then I discovered Mongo while catching up on Angular, and enjoyed using it with the mostly small apps and prototypes I build. I don't know it well enough to try and support it's use on a large scale. After seeing how poorly designed the data is for so many companies out there, it's not a surprise to hear poor choices were made (and probably some poor execution).

irrational 9y ago

I don't know. I was just in a meeting where a team announced that they would need a ton of money and time to move off of MongoDB. The VP reminded them of when they had chosen to move to MongoDB years ago and asked them what happened to all of their promises about how great MongoDB would be. They responded that the promise of MongoDB and the reality are very different and MongoDB has turned out to be a disaster.

threepipeproblm 9y ago

But MongoDB's own cite cites Indeed.com Job Trends data only through 2012, on the basis that Mongo's growth is a reason to use it. Current Indeed.com Job Trends data actually show better numbers than the 2102 stats, but nonetheless show MongoDB jobs in decline. https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-MongoDB.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-MongoDB.html