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Comment by _ques | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I feel this is the Achilles' heel of an otherwise splendid website. Their NIH syndrome forces them to implement everything in C++ ( http://www.okcupid.com/faq : 200K lines of C++ ). I don't know how to be agile with a system like that, and it probably explains the rate of feature growth compared to other social networks (FB, Friendfeed, Quora)

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Either they've completely documented the stack and API so that new employees can get up to speed quickly and if their lead developers get hit by a bus they can continue as a viable business. In which case they've spent lots of valuable resources working on documentation.

Or their technology is poorly documented and basically an oral tradition. God help them if their lead developers get hit by a bus.

> I don't know how to be agile with a system like that

I think that they're implementing a lot of stuff in client side javascript because of that. A few days ago a redditor discovered that there're a lot of parameters of each profile right there on the page source, like the number of messages received today, last week and some attractiveness scale.

Where else would those parameters be than in the page source?

Ajax call? It's supposed to be private data.

I wasn't clear: I meant, if you visit other people's profile, you can see that info there, that is used to display whether the person replies frequently or not.

Agility is just getting your process right. C++ can be extremely agile with the right team and the right process. We're living proof.

(My company sells high performance C++ post-modern databases and we've been able to pivot really quickly)

I guess it only makes sense that "post-modern databases" are written in C++. Meta me this!

We're not big fans of the "NoSQL" term. ;)

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