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> In the long run you won't be able to buy your way out of a shitty foundation. From what little I've heard about Twitter's development, I don't think they're
by jonah 18y ago
> In the long run you won't be able to buy your way out of a shitty foundation.
From what little I've heard about Twitter's development, I don't think they're mindlessly sticking to their initial model. They've been actively looking at ways to move beyond their initial RAD app. Now, I'm sure they had reasons to choose Scala for a layer, whether it's the best or not. Should they have gone with [insert-your-favorite-language-here] instead is largely a matter religious debate.
Any approach has inherent strengths and weaknesses. You can also write bad code in even the "best" languages. But to say they're simply throwing more hardware at inefficient code is probably a misrepresentation of their approach.
- jonknee 18y agoThat line was in reply to the article author's statement that the only way to go is a mainframe: > No, there’s only one systems architecture that will solve the Fail Whales once and for all. That is certainly one way to go. Another is to be clever. That's what startups do best... A large company goes to buy a main frame and Oracle licenses while the startup has a really clever idea and orders a bunch of servers from Dell.
- jonah 18y ago> Another is to be clever. That's what startups do best... Amen to that. The fact that we give Twitter such a hard time about their growing pains is reflective of our growing "reliance" on them. Clever approaches to "mission-critical" applications will include plenty of trial and error and iteration. A bank's not going to say "let's experiment with some other approaches." I think that's the point of the article - if you need it to "just work", go with something that can provide that. Not to say they won't eventually get to a comparable point using unorthodox techniques, there will just be stumbles along the way.