Pretty harsh response to a post from an intern, dudes and dudettes. Yeah, the erlang server code was pretty gross. It was one of the very first things written

Pretty harsh response to a post from an intern, dudes and dudettes. Yeah, the erlang server code was pretty gross. It was one of the very first things written when we started Mixpanel over 2 years ago, and it's only been updated a few times since then. I feel like the big thing you guys are missing is how little time we have. It's not like we don't know when we have bad code, or we don't realize that we made mistakes in the initial server design - we just have a million things on our collective plate. Fixing a very simple server - (accept request, validate json, put on queue) that is doing its job okay hasn't been a high priority thing. When this code was written, Mixpanel had zero customers and we weren't sure what we were building yet. In that regard, Erlang has been a rock. We've barely had to touch it during the rampup from 0 to thousands of requests per second. Now that we have the manpower, and we've learned what we really need, we can rewrite it to make things easier on ourselves. If we can get acceptable performance in python, there is no reason to use erlang. I think there's some merit to the other complaints (error codes, etc), but that's another symptom of this thing being written so long ago. We want to improve things incrementally (and backwards-compatibly) for now, but it will be dramatically simpler for us to make changes to the server now that it's written in python. Ultimately, we have skeletons in the closet, just like the rest of you - I'm sure all of you have some bad code in production somewhere. Now we're saying "Look, we're getting rid of our skeletons!" and you guys are like "OMG WHY YOU HAVE SKELETONS" instead of "sweet, no more skeletons".