4 ms·
I don't know if this is Facebook's case, but when I've seen stuff like that happening, it was because a bunch of (otherwise smart) developers were far too arrog
by weland 13y ago
I don't know if this is Facebook's case, but when I've seen stuff like that happening, it was because a bunch of (otherwise smart) developers were far too arrogant about the quality of their own work, too derogatory and, to some degree, too superficial about the quality of other programmers' work, and -- perhaps fatally -- too driven by the can-do-no-matter-what attitude that is so obnoxiously prevalent in today's corporate world, at the expense of common sense. Between the technical debt and the management pressure, I've seen a bunch of people refusing to admit it's their fault and cleverly save their asses (and earn a hefty bonus on one or two occasions) by doing something any sane programmer would have, in fact, fired them for.
- r0muald 13y agoLike building the entire system in PHP, then throwing HipHop at it? Seems to work though.
- mseebach 13y agoI'm not convinced that HipHop is an example of that. As I understand it, HipHop allowed Facebook to increase performance hugely with a very modest investment, and very low risk. Rewriting all the critical bits of Facebook in a different language to realize the same speed-up would likely have required a lot more resources and been orders of magnitude more risky.
- Crito 13y agoThe difficulty in "rewriting [critical, or otherwise] bits of Facebook" is probably related to the same decisions that make "single repo for everything" the logical choice for the site.