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A bunch of "typical" programmers wrote a program in C++, and it turned out crappy. A "super smart guy" rewrote it in Go, and it turned out nice. How much of the
by jdale27 13y ago
A bunch of "typical" programmers wrote a program in C++, and it turned out crappy. A "super smart guy" rewrote it in Go, and it turned out nice. How much of the delta between crappy and nice was due to the language, and how much to the programmer? (And how much is due to the new programmer learning from the old programmer's mistakes?)
As with all anecdotal language advocacy, you have to take it with a grain of salt, and in this case maybe more than usual.
- chrissnell 13y agoBrad even acknowledges that the original program was nice in it's day. C++ complicated things but it sounded like the bigger problem was developers leaving the team and new features being hackishly implemented.
- scottlamb 13y agoAnd don't underestimate "changing environment". As Brad said, "in 2007, using local disk wasn't restricted ... in 2012, containers get tiny % of local disk spindle time ... cluster file systems own disk time on your machine, not you." Within Google today, if you're directly using local disk instead of the Google storage stack, you're going to have a bad time. Even more so if you're calling read() from a single-threaded event loop.