4 ms·
Why is it that folks who point out that Facebook, Twitter, and Square all had to move to a "fast" language never seem to be able to point to any company (in the
by kemiller 14y ago
Why is it that folks who point out that Facebook, Twitter, and Square all had to move to a "fast" language never seem to be able to point to any company (in the current generation) that achieved massive success by starting in a fast language? Having to transition to another language once you achieve success is a pretty solvable problem in comparison to actually creating a product successful enough that platform matters.
For that matter, neither Square nor Twitter have exactly "migrated" (I don't know about Facebook). They optimized hotspots -- a long and storied tradition. Even C programmers drop down into assembly.
Use different pieces for what they're best at.
- ckluis 14y agoOptimizing what needs to be optimized by using different tools is exactly what the big companies should do.
- munificent 14y ago> never seem to be able to point to any company (in the current generation) that achieved massive success by starting in a fast language? Didn't Google start in C++?
- chrismcbride 14y agoActually the first version was written in Java. EDIT: Also, the original crawler was written in python. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kemiller 14y agoGoogle is not the current generation. In 1998, hardware was not fast enough to make dynamic languages feasible.
- wmf 14y agoWeren't a lot of Web sites written in Perl in 1998? And there was the AOLServer/Tcl crowd, but we won't speak of that.
- kemiller 14y agoI'm not sure why that's controversial. Sure, Perl was quite popular in the CGI days, but at scale? I guess Yahoo has been using PHP for a long time. Certainly things like Ruby, and maybe Python, were not really feasible until we had faster hardware.
- baudehlo 14y agoOKCupid. Started and continue to do most things in C++, though I believe they now also have some Node.js stuff in there too.
- Androsynth 14y agoFacebook still writes features in php, they just compile to C++ to eke out performance (i dont work there). I'm not sure where he got the "fixed" quotation from, the word 'fix' is not mentioned at all in the fb post to which he linked.
- perlgeek 14y agostackoverflow and the whole network was written in C# from the very start, and still is.
- charliesome 14y ago> Even C programmers drop down into assembly. C programmers usually only drop down to assembly to do something that can't be done in C