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His argument is that slow languages are acceptable now because databases are slow due to slow hard drives. But this seems not right to me. Most databases eat
by mindstab 15y ago
His argument is that slow languages are acceptable now because databases are slow due to slow hard drives.
But this seems not right to me. Most databases eat as much RAM as they can get their hands on, and in any reasonable sized setup, the frontend and database will be on different servers so you still have to factor in internet work transit time. What this boils down to is that harddrive speed increases won't make as much of a difference as he is counting on because
a) They aren't necessarily the biggest bottleneck now
b) Even if they were a bottleneck, we still often have network transit time to account for, making DB access still relatively dog slow.
This doesn't even take into account the entirely different set of arguments that other languages like php and python are an order of magnitude faster than ruby 1.8 (and ruby 1.9 is faster too) and that Java is considered by many a horrible language, and no speed increase in the world would make them willingly use it.
- teh 15y agoYes to this and the other comment mentioning joins being slow. If your $DYNAMIC-LANGUAGE is too slow - something that is kind of hard to achieve on today's servers - you just add another one (your frontend is running something like nginx anyway, right?). Development speed is much more important. Some people are fast in Java, I am not.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- equalarrow 15y agoYah, his arguments are silly. Sure, Java is faster, but people left for/use Ruby (mostly Rails) because making a web app in Java became horribly inefficient. I know, I did this for years and left for that exact reason. Spring, Hibernate, jars that all used different logging that leaked memory in different ways, deploying, verbose syntax - it all became too much for me. I'm sure Scala will address some of these things, but if anything, I think what will materialize is the opposite of his argument. If anything, faster 'disks' and databases will just allow people to use Ruby or Python even more. I'm not sure Ruby will ever be as fast as Java, but again, that's never the reason why I left the Java world for Ruby/Rails. Productivity was.