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I think it did make a technically interesting point--if your infrastructure is written in a language that nobody in your team has mastered, it might be worth th
by fleaflicker 15y ago
I think it did make a technically interesting point--if your infrastructure is written in a language that nobody in your team has mastered, it might be worth the investment to port it to something else.
Erlang is widely regarded as a great platform for servers with lots of concurrent connections because threads are so lightweight (Facebook chat is built on Erlang). And yet Mixpanel decided to rewrite in a language that would be more maintainable for them in the future.
- gms 15y agoYeah, I don't think anyone disagrees with you. It's just that this point was rather hidden beneath a misleading title and content!
- lightcatcher 15y agoI don't think the title is misleading at all. "How and Why We Switched from Erlang to Python". How - by writing a WSGI app that uses gevent and simplejson Why - because the Erlang code was old, no one knew Erlang well enough to maintain, and Python is the language used everywhere else at Mixpanel The title wasn't "OMG PYTHON RULEZ ERLANG SUCKZ!!". The only real ambiguity in the title was that Mixpanel (as a whole codebase) didn't switch from Erlang to Python, just a small module switched. What did you expect with this title? More language criticism?
- gms 15y agoOn second reading, you're right. I'm now trying to decide if I should delete by original comment.