3 ms·

there's a difference between should be and should have been maybe it's easier to do this half-measure than rewrite your entire code base

vasilipupkin 9y ago
I get that part, but for new projects, this perhaps is a hint to do things in Java?
- newfoundglory 9y ago
  80% of startups are going to die before their codebase reaches this size. They should probably not be making tech stack choices based on "what if we succeed beyond all likelihood".
  - vasilipupkin 9y ago
    two things come to mind: maybe those startups would die at a slower rate if their code was comprehensible to begin with ? but leaving that aside, for companies where survival is not an issue then, doesn't this indicate that using a dynamically typed language is not great?
    - panopticon 9y ago
      I would be interested in seeing the number of startups that fail due to technical debt. My instinct is that most startups fail for business reasons (no clear need, not enough/right sales, poor management, bad pitch, solving the wrong problem, etc).
    - depressedpanda 9y ago
      Well, in the case of Instagram, this just shows that Python was a great choice. They went with a dynamically typed language, were successful, the language they chose added an optional type hinting system, and they wrote a tool that would automatically type hint their code in order to reap many of the benefits of a static type system. I think that the amount of man hours that went into writing the tool is negligible, so it's a net win for Instagram.
- lmm 9y ago
  New projects at large companies often are written in Java. New projects at startups aren't and shouldn't be - doubling future maintenance costs for the sake of a 20% reduction in development time now is a good trade, because 90% of startups fail, the important thing is to validate product/market fit as soon as possible. (Though really you should just use Scala and get both Java-like safety and Python-like productivity)

vasilipupkin 9y ago

I get that part, but for new projects, this perhaps is a hint to do things in Java?

newfoundglory 9y ago
80% of startups are going to die before their codebase reaches this size. They should probably not be making tech stack choices based on "what if we succeed beyond all likelihood".
- vasilipupkin 9y ago
  two things come to mind: maybe those startups would die at a slower rate if their code was comprehensible to begin with ? but leaving that aside, for companies where survival is not an issue then, doesn't this indicate that using a dynamically typed language is not great?
  - panopticon 9y ago
    I would be interested in seeing the number of startups that fail due to technical debt. My instinct is that most startups fail for business reasons (no clear need, not enough/right sales, poor management, bad pitch, solving the wrong problem, etc).
  - depressedpanda 9y ago
    Well, in the case of Instagram, this just shows that Python was a great choice. They went with a dynamically typed language, were successful, the language they chose added an optional type hinting system, and they wrote a tool that would automatically type hint their code in order to reap many of the benefits of a static type system. I think that the amount of man hours that went into writing the tool is negligible, so it's a net win for Instagram.
lmm 9y ago
New projects at large companies often are written in Java. New projects at startups aren't and shouldn't be - doubling future maintenance costs for the sake of a 20% reduction in development time now is a good trade, because 90% of startups fail, the important thing is to validate product/market fit as soon as possible. (Though really you should just use Scala and get both Java-like safety and Python-like productivity)