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Google has close to the best internal tooling in the industry for a decade or so. Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they bui
by fooker 2mo ago
Google has close to the best internal tooling in the industry for a decade or so.
Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.
- frollogaston 2mo agoReplacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.
- flymasterv 2mo agoReact? Lucky. I wrote Closure (with an S) at GOOG in anger 5 years ago, and only stopped because I switched teams.
- nostrademons 2mo agoAngular was an acquisition and isn't all that commonly used within Google. Closure was the homegrown framework that's everywhere. It is a different flavor of bad than Angular. Angular was basically "You too can make your Javascript look like HTML", Closure is "You too can make your Javascript look like Java", and nobody bothered to ask Why? For that matter, React was "You too can make your Javascript look like Ocaml." JQuery was the only framework that really let Javascript be Javascript (other than writing in vanilla JS, which post-ES2015 wasn't as insane as it sounds).
- frollogaston 2mo agoAnd then there's GWT which was "you can write webpages in Java." Yeah I never really kept up with the web frameworks there, just knew that for non-customer-facing things we were always recommended to use Angular, and that Wiz also exists.
- KptMarchewa 2mo agoBackend-generated templated web apps were the pinnacle of web development in 00s.
- frollogaston 2mo agoIt kinda is again today with Nextjs, but that's way better than the old stuff.
- mikaraento 2mo agoThough to be more charitable closure was a direct reaction to the difficulty of maintaining a huge JavaScript codebase for Gmail and static typing like Java really helped. Typescript is better but closure was miles better than raw js.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ragall 2mo agoAngular is not a developer tool, it's a UI framework. Closure might qualify, but it was not a general tool used by the entire company. The developer tools we're talking here are Critique, Blaze, Forge, Sigma, etc...
- frollogaston 2mo agoI counted all the above as tools in my original comment at least. And my criticism wasn't against some of those foundational tools. Like Borg is fine for what it's meant to do, but anyone deploying a frontend or backend isn't doing it directly on Borg.
- ragall 2mo agoIndeed, those doing frontend work would not interact with Borg or the SRE tools directly, but they would use Blaze, Critique and all the development toolchain, which is still much above anything available on the open market.
- dehrmann 2mo agoIt's more like Buck and Tupperware.
- mikert89 2mo agogoogle had the best tooling a decade ago...
- fooker 2mo agoOkay yeah, fair point. My comment was from a decade old perspective
- fragmede 2mo agoWho has the best tooling now?
- nostrademons 2mo agoFabrice Bellard.
- dolmen 2mo agoWell. He still writes C.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- swrrt 2mo agoSounds like a big-company issue, large scale lead to large burden and complexity.