7 ms·
Elon: Code is brittle. Need a complete rewrite
- fwlr 4y agoMoonshot project: stick half a dozen devs in an office and have them rewrite Twitter’s backend in Rust, and stick another half a dozen devs in the next office and have them rewrite Twitter’s frontend in Elixir/Phoenix.
- solresol 4y agoThis would be the most beautiful experiment. Somehow we would need to track to two code bases for a decade afterwards and see which was the better choice.
- KptMarchewa 4y agoHis moonshot would be python
- sleepybrett 4y agoego is brittle, needs a complete reckoning with reality.
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- Zigurd 4y agoImagine a VP of engineering saying what's in that tweet. How many minutes until they are fired af?
- hindsightbias 4y agoHow about a Kickstarter for funding a McKinsey review? We just want to help.
- roflyear 4y agoAt my company they'd be promoted to CTO!
- BizarroLand 4y agoI imagine a jr. programmer saying that to his sr. when he can't figure something out, before the sr. points out the trivial solution to them with a pat on the head and sends them back to the code mines.
- reducesuffering 4y agoIf we’re going by Elon’s precedent with a Senior Android Engineer, looks like about 2 hours. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23458247/elon-musk-fires-engineer-correcting-twitter https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23458247/elon-musk-fires...
- 082349872349872 4y agoMusk (1971) is chronologically older than The Mythical Man Month (1975), but I bet it had already been published by the time he could have understood it. cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
- thwg 4y agoDo that in Rust.
- adt 4y ago23 years ago... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- DonsDiscountGas 4y agoBeat me to it
- Zigurd 4y ago"Second system syndrome" is what came to my mind. But I'm wicked old.
- lamontcg 4y agoActually its not going to be that. That's when you've got something small that works and the rewrite is a bloated mess of every feature you could dream of. This is the case where you've got an accumulation of over a decade of technical debt and Chesterton's Fences and someone who has no idea why the code is the way that it is inherits it and decides to rewrite it, and not knowing which constraints are necessary and which aren't they throw away most of them and find out the hard way that the problem isn't actually that simple. It is almost the inverse of the second system syndrome. But it is abundantly clear that Elon doesn't even know how to have this conversation.
- Zigurd 4y agoIn a sane acquisition a list of issues would have some out in technical dd. Not that Elon would have listened to anyone doing technical dd.
- bmitc 4y agoIt can be a legitimate strategy. Hard rules in software rarely work.
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- rad_gruchalski 4y agoGo for it. You have a lot of money to burn. Full-Scale Disaster.
- netsharc 4y agoIn a comedy world, the results of Twitter rewrite won't be a website where people can publish 280 characters at a time, but a software that will be able to drive a car autonomously...
- proc0 4y agoEnterprise code is brittle. It's limited by business requirements like having multiple teams working on the same feature, or having the flexibility to change teams and have new people work on partially finished code. In theory we could make software that lasts for decades, given some languages have been around for that long. Even if the programming languages changed, software could be abstracted and worked on a level that transcends technical specs. The problem is that it is not viable for large organizations with hundreds of engineers that are constantly rotating and changing focus. Business is too short-term oriented to care for any benefits of long-term engineering. I'm not saying it's good or bad, and maybe this changes as we move further and further into the information age.
- peatmoss 4y agoThis wouldn't be the first rewrite of Twitter. It feels like a Monty Python sketch: "So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp."
- wildpeaks 4y agoThen he should go ahead and rewrite it himself.
- postalrat 4y agoDo it in rust and all of hn will be cheering for you.
- moosedev 4y agoElon sure reminds me of an inexperienced, over-confident (or "just enough experience to be dangerous") software engineer at times. One who has enough experience to see flaws in an existing (or "legacy") system and feel they could do better if they just rewrote it all from scratch, but not enough experience (or too much hubris) to know how well that does or does not go in practice. He may be right, of course. I'm just pattern matching on what he sounds like...
- bmitc 4y agoWe shouldn't beat around the bush. Musk has shown very few times that he has any idea what he is talking about. His tweet sounds identical to some middle manager's sentiment you'd get at some huge conglomerate trying to make a name for themself after taking over a group. And it should be noted that he's responding to another tech billionaire who fancies himself as an oracle as well. This is like throwing around verbal spars at the water cooler at the local squash club.
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- mrhands556 4y agoAt his level who has had consistently more or the same level of success doing something similar to him? I don’t understand all the Elon hate lately outside of people being bias for the sake of the narrative.
- garbagecoder 4y agoHe’s probably right?? but brittle’s inevitable with something like that. If his plan is to just min FTEs, I bet it does need a rewrite. But it will still be brittle. If this brings value to shareholders, somehow, then don’t hate the player hate the game. I think Elmo is more or less sociopathic at this point, but I think he’s more correct about Twitter than people think, just not in the way people think. I think it can be profitable still. He’ll overcome his brand damage eventually.
- wallace_g 4y ago[dead]
- guax 4y agoYou could abstract this for any technical area to show how empty of a statement it ends up being. Thinking about Teslas: A small wiring change had massive ramifications. The car construction is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete redesign.