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Go wasn't a serious option for Instagram though. According to Wikipedia Instagram launched in 2010, Go launched in 2009. That would have made them very early ad
by jimnotgym 9y ago
Go wasn't a serious option for Instagram though. According to Wikipedia Instagram launched in 2010, Go launched in 2009. That would have made them very early adopters, was the library support there back then like it was for Python?
Just because there may be better tools now, should they scrap their working code that earned their fortune?
- fiatjaf 9y agoI'm not talking about Instagram, I'm answering the parent comment, which talked about developer productivity in general.
- lmm 9y agoWell, OCaml, Haskell or maybe Scala would've been mature options in 2010, combining safety with language-level productivity that's comparable to Python, though the extent to which web frameworks available in those languages at that time were Django-equivalent is arguable. (Personally I would - and did - happily choose Scala with Wicket over Django in 2010) In terms of what Instagram should do now, I'd say they should do what Facebook did: introduce thrift or similar, gradually move business logic into backend services written in more suitable languages, leaving the Python to eventually become just a thin web frontend. Retrofitting types onto code involves a lot of the same effort as rewriting it into a better language, and the rewards for the latter are higher, IME.