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Out of interest, to what degree do you think the improvement in comprehensibility is from the new ecosystem vs performing a rewrite with learnings from the orig

Out of interest, to what degree do you think the improvement in comprehensibility is from the new ecosystem vs performing a rewrite with learnings from the original write?

tomohawk 9y ago
In the first case, we inherited the codebase. However, it was clear that too much attention was paid to low level stuff such as threading, etc. Ruby allowed us to more easily focus on the problem with more of a micro services approach. The Java monolith we replaced was emblematic of its time. Frameworks piled on libraries piled on other things. A lot of complexity to achieve the intended function. The move to golang has been really interesting. The language really does seem to scale well with teams. Its great to be able to pick up even code that you would expect to be complicated, such as the golang tls library, and be able to understand it. The much easier to use concurrency and fantastic standard library mean there's a lot less looking around for which framework to use or which approach to apply.
- twunde 9y ago
  I want to explicitly call out an important point here. They inherited the original codebase and were able to understand the domain problems and what the original solution got wrong AND what it got right. Pretty much any language or framework they chose to rewrite the application in should have seen similar benefits (even if rewritten in Java). I've seen several projects where a rewrite was given to a entirely new team and those projects tend to be as complex or more so than the original (and tend to take a long time to ship)
  - _pmf_ 9y ago
    Often, it's politically possible to achieve a complete rewrite by switching to another language, while staying in the same language would cause pressure to reuse parts of the old system or refactor the old system. Which is a bit sad.
    - swsieber 9y ago
      That's a good point - a could top level comment could be: "We switched from x to y. It was important because it justified rewriting the thing, which improved performance. Would have loved to rewrite it in x, but support just wasn't there."
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  I'm slowly converting all my old homegrown Ruby / Perl / Python projects to Go and enjoying it. I never wrote complicated code anyway but Go really pushes you into simple readable code that's much easier to reason about.

Out of interest, to what degree do you think the improvement in comprehensibility is from the new ecosystem vs performing a rewrite with learnings from the original write?

tomohawk 9y ago

In the first case, we inherited the codebase. However, it was clear that too much attention was paid to low level stuff such as threading, etc. Ruby allowed us to more easily focus on the problem with more of a micro services approach. The Java monolith we replaced was emblematic of its time. Frameworks piled on libraries piled on other things. A lot of complexity to achieve the intended function. The move to golang has been really interesting. The language really does seem to scale well with teams. Its great to be able to pick up even code that you would expect to be complicated, such as the golang tls library, and be able to understand it. The much easier to use concurrency and fantastic standard library mean there's a lot less looking around for which framework to use or which approach to apply.

twunde 9y ago
I want to explicitly call out an important point here. They inherited the original codebase and were able to understand the domain problems and what the original solution got wrong AND what it got right. Pretty much any language or framework they chose to rewrite the application in should have seen similar benefits (even if rewritten in Java). I've seen several projects where a rewrite was given to a entirely new team and those projects tend to be as complex or more so than the original (and tend to take a long time to ship)
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  Often, it's politically possible to achieve a complete rewrite by switching to another language, while staying in the same language would cause pressure to reuse parts of the old system or refactor the old system. Which is a bit sad.
  - swsieber 9y ago
    That's a good point - a could top level comment could be: "We switched from x to y. It was important because it justified rewriting the thing, which improved performance. Would have loved to rewrite it in x, but support just wasn't there."
zimpenfish 9y ago
I'm slowly converting all my old homegrown Ruby / Perl / Python projects to Go and enjoying it. I never wrote complicated code anyway but Go really pushes you into simple readable code that's much easier to reason about.