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I'm not sure what the problems are, and I agree with others' sentiment that they need to focus on business and advertising. Still, as someone who in the last fe
by rufugee 16y ago
I'm not sure what the problems are, and I agree with others' sentiment that they need to focus on business and advertising. Still, as someone who in the last few years has bought into the Rails explanation of scaling (sure, ruby is slow, but you can scale horizontally with more servers after you're sold and have bajillions to spend), I wonder if this is a bad sign for startups using dynamic languages.
I've played around with www.playframework.org, and in my tests it was a LOT faster than ruby, while offering many of the same benefits as Rails. I know Reddit is written in Python with Pylons, but I wonder if all those CPU cycles they sacrificed by using Python instead of Java wouldn't come in handy now?
- starkfist 16y agoYeah, the trick about that is that servers aren't really as cheap as everyone says. Also, with horizontal scaling you spend more money elsewhere: on stuff the programmers usually don't know shit about, like big-iron loadbalancers, and on systems administration. So when someone says "hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive" be aware that they are forgetting about systems administrators who are often more expensive than programmers. I was recently involved with a project where we were able to reduce our server costs by an order of magnitude by switching from ruby to java.
- brunoc 16y agoI'd love to hear more about this ruby -> java transition if you're willing to share.
- code_duck 16y agoGenerally, the steps are 1> rewrite your Ruby code in Java
- starkfist 16y agoYeah, what he said... sort of. First we tried just smushing everything into JRuby, but that was a mess. We then split the app into a bunch of services, instead of one monolithic rails beast. Each new service is a simple java app. It was a gradual process, taking about 7 months.
- code_duck 16y agoAdmittedly, my list was a little short on specifics.