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Comment by femiagbabiaka | Hacker News Reader

Your metaphor doesn’t really apply — this isn’t business software, it’s part of a distributed job scheduler. That is inherently complicated. There is of course an open argument of language choice, but I think there’s something to learn from the lack of software built in $BETTER_LANGUAGE.

It’s also an open source project, so if anyone wanted to throw up a branch with an example of simplification without sacrificing logic branch completeness that door is open. Code might even convince the k8s team to change what you think is misguided behavior.

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If you're saying they should have solved a distributed problem with a distributed language like Erlang, I'd probably agree.

> That is inherently complicated. There is of course an open argument of language choice, but I think there’s something to learn from the lack of software built in $BETTER_LANGUAGE.

Sometimes the best software is no software. Kubernetes exists to solve problems that people using better languages don't generally have.

> It’s also an open source project, so if anyone wanted to throw up a branch with an example of simplification without sacrificing logic branch completeness that door is open.

The "Please do not attempt to simplify this code" comment suggests otherwise. In any case, the team have chosen a language in which good solutions are not possible.

> Kubernetes exists to solve problems that people using better languages don't generally have

This statement doesn't make sense, and the arrogant tone just stinks of ignorance.

Kubernetes isn't perfect, but if there's better provider-agnostic language-agnostic way to dynamically scale an application written in heterogeneous languages across a cluster or on a competitive choice of cloud platforms with dynamic provisioning, I'd like you to tell us, and explain why it's better than Kubernetes.

Language agnosticism isn't something to discard lightly. Different languages have different strengths and weaknesses.

In my experience the costs of language agnosticism outweigh the benefits even without considering deployment. Good languages are general-purpose; a language that is drastically unsuited to some particular thing is probably not worth using at all, and if you're using a language that is decent at most things then the overhead of switching languages is higher than the benefit of using a language that gives a small advantage in some specialised area.

What language you have in mind? All the languages I have known or used are drastically unsuited for one or other thing. So they all seem not worth using.

I mostly work in Scala these days. But really any ML-family language is fine for everything. Garbage collection is not the barrier to writing system tools or soft realtime that it's reputed to be (the fact that people advocate Go for those use cases is proof of that).

(The JVM startup can be a bit slow for scripting one-liners, particularly if you're running them on every file in a directory or some such. There was a time when I would switch to Python or Bash for those, but I realized I was wasting more time making mistakes in those languages than I ever saved at runtime)

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