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Comment by nateberkopec | Hacker News Reader

Let me get this straight: you're arguing that a 10-year-old top-100-in-the-world website taking 4 full-time engineers and having them upgrade their core framework 2 major version over 18 months is some sort of massive failure, and that failure would be solved with static types?

Also, you're saying that Github hasn't added any new features in the last 18 months?

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I'm not sure any other technology stack would have fared much better.

Consider that 6 years, 2 months, and 20 days passed between Rails 3.2 and Rails 5.2. That's quite a bit of time for the framework to evolve. Then factor in the customizations from several non-framework dependencies and those added by GitHub.

This is an incredible achievement no matter how you slice it.

Yes, four FTE engineers taking 18 months to upgrade across two major versions indicates a massive problem, but not necessarily with Rails or Ruby. That's a cost of $1.5M give or take, just on the engineers, not including the opportunity cost in new feature development or paying other equally important tech debt.

$7 billion dollar company, $1.5M cost? $7 BILLION. Your order of magnitudes are waaaaayyyyy off.

This is the inverse of survivor bias, in that you are retroactively applying "best practice" at the wrong scale. What gets you from $0 to $7B may hurt you at $7B. Heck, may hurt you way earlier than that.

However, and YMMV on what problem you want to solve, but saving $1.5M, heck lets 10X it and call it $15M, saving $15M when worth $7B isn't the problem I'd personally be concerned with.

React 16 was a perfectly smooth upgrade for a massive part of the web ecosystem. It took 1 engineer to bump the version number and to test. Maybe a week or two at most to check that nothing was broken.

The React core team update tens of thousands of Facebook's components every time they update, I expect they'll continue to have uniquely smooth upgrades while that's the case.

It is a massive failure, and it would be solved by static types.

I could take a big, unmaintained 10 years old Haskell codebase and upgrade it to the newest compiler and libraries in a couple of days, at most (and it would most likely work on the first try after it compiles).

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