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Good god, the comments in this thread really show how douchy the HN community can be. Tons of anecdotal stories with no evidence. Obvious outsiders trying to i

by kimmel 14y ago

Good god, the comments in this thread really show how douchy the HN community can be. Tons of anecdotal stories with no evidence. Obvious outsiders trying to image what it is like on the inside (all the guesses about how DDG works) and of course no facts to back anything up. I would say this pandering and uninformed behaviour is not common on HN, but it is. People who engage in language flame wars simply do not understand that when you become a good programmer languages do not matter only the platforms matter.

hammerzeit 14y ago
Leaving aside one trolly user, most of the conversation here is either referencing data mentioned in the article or asking questions/having discussions about semi-related points. I'd hardly call the argument over language speed a 'flame war' by any internet standard I've ever seen. There are probably better examples than this one to pull the 'HN commenters suck' card. The conversation here is mostly civil and trying to learn things, one troll aside.
- rehack 14y ago
  Agree. The choice of perl actually does surprise people, genuinely. As somewhere else mentioned, even blekko uses perl. So obviously these people know what they are doing. But that said, choosing anything interpreted does come to haunt you later on, in some way or the other. We run Java on Jettys for most of the things for our app (traffic is around 60k/70k in a day, so much less in comparison). But even with this traffic, we need to use 2 large EC2 instances in the day time. And mysteriously the Jettys keep going out of memory every now and then.* I am sure the same thing if done in C++ would need only 1 large EC2 instance. And it will also help the latency a bit, as a parallel gain. At present am analyzing the cost/benefit of such a move. Inputs are welcome. * With Java its always the memory which hurts you first. Latency wise, not much of a difference, in most cases. Edit: Down vote? Surprised. Why??
burrows 14y ago
> People who engage in language flame wars simply do not understand that when you become a good programmer languages do not matter only the platforms matter. Guess you're building the next killer app in brainfuck?
- kimmel 14y ago
  Brainfuck really does not have much going for it as a platform. For an example of what I mean check out Jeff Atwood's article http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/reddit-language-vs-platform.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/reddit-language-vs-...

by kimmel 14y ago

hammerzeit 14y ago

Leaving aside one trolly user, most of the conversation here is either referencing data mentioned in the article or asking questions/having discussions about semi-related points. I'd hardly call the argument over language speed a 'flame war' by any internet standard I've ever seen. There are probably better examples than this one to pull the 'HN commenters suck' card. The conversation here is mostly civil and trying to learn things, one troll aside.

rehack 14y ago
Agree. The choice of perl actually does surprise people, genuinely. As somewhere else mentioned, even blekko uses perl. So obviously these people know what they are doing. But that said, choosing anything interpreted does come to haunt you later on, in some way or the other. We run Java on Jettys for most of the things for our app (traffic is around 60k/70k in a day, so much less in comparison). But even with this traffic, we need to use 2 large EC2 instances in the day time. And mysteriously the Jettys keep going out of memory every now and then.* I am sure the same thing if done in C++ would need only 1 large EC2 instance. And it will also help the latency a bit, as a parallel gain. At present am analyzing the cost/benefit of such a move. Inputs are welcome. * With Java its always the memory which hurts you first. Latency wise, not much of a difference, in most cases. Edit: Down vote? Surprised. Why??

burrows 14y ago

> People who engage in language flame wars simply do not understand that when you become a good programmer languages do not matter only the platforms matter. Guess you're building the next killer app in brainfuck?

kimmel 14y ago
Brainfuck really does not have much going for it as a platform. For an example of what I mean check out Jeff Atwood's article http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/reddit-language-vs-platform.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/reddit-language-vs-...