Heh - I'm working on a MapReduce blog post as we speak (see http://tinyurl.com/6oylnr http://tinyurl.com/6oylnr). So I suppose I'm prone to his attack. I actua

Heh - I'm working on a MapReduce blog post as we speak (see http://tinyurl.com/6oylnr http://tinyurl.com/6oylnr). So I suppose I'm prone to his attack. I actually think he makes one good point, that virtually no one actually needs to use MapReduce, let alone implement it, let alone write a blog tutorial on how to implement it. That said, virtually no one needs to write a compiler either, and yet understanding compilers (or even writing one) is not a waste. Also, his comparison of a message queue (Starling) to MapReduce almost makes you wonder if he really understands MapReduce. Starling has nothing to do with MapReduce, and MapReduce is completely unrelated to Twitter's scaling problems.