It's impossible for EVERY tool to be good. This isn't reality. There has to be tools that are patently bad to use and people have used these bad tools to build great things. But it doesn't change the fact that a tool can be horrible to use.
I would argue that at the time the article was written, Mongo was definitively a bad tool. Things have changed, but not all things.
This kind of attitude and softness towards criticism - "All tools are great" is not how we need to operate. Professional, well articulated and constructive criticism needs to be on the table.
I downvoted the GP for this reason.
I advise everyone here to listen to criticisms and write them as well. Don't be afraid of some kind of a backlash, express freely.
I'm not about making things that simple by default, but I don't like those absolutist titles like "Never use MongoDB", also because the years since 2013 actually proved the article to be kind of wrong.
"Never do X" is what I tell to children about matters that they wouldn't be able to understand, and making a point like "we used an immature tool that wasn't the best choice for what we were building, and on top of that we used it wrong, so you random guy should never use it for anything, ever" sounds like fearmongering to me and it's not something suitable to my taste.
But I get your downvote :+1:
Equally, it’s important to also tone down “X is nothing but the best” and praises should also require equal and opposite constructivism.
I would reword your comment as: "If you are building something and excited, then keep going, don't stop because a blog told you 'never'". I think that's what your main point was, and it's a good one.
In the case of MongoDB, many people thought that with it you'll have all of the benefits of, say, PostgreSQL, without having to think much about your data schema. History has shown that this is not the case -- as usual, it's about tradeoffs. There are no absolute wins: if you want an RDBMS, you have to put more work in X, if you want a document store then you have to try really hard with Y.
"MongoDB vs. RDBMS" is a very old and tired argument by now but it basically boils down to: people started using MongoDB wide-eyed, optimistically and with more enthusiasm than engineering skill and of course, there were harsh reality checks.
I really appreciate that people took the time to express their opinions starting from a simple statement like the one I wrote, and I don't think that each and every comment needs to be a complete analysis of every possible nuance of the subject we are commenting about.
I'm not a monolithic person, I prefer a conversational approach when discussing opinions, but that's just a matter of personal taste.
Anyway, to make my point I'll use as an example two projects I was personally involved and still bring food on the table: NodeJS + MongoDB (started 7 years ago, still on it); MariaDB + PHP + FORTRAN (started 4 years ago, after the first two years only consulting from time to time). Fun fact: right now I could swap one DB for the other and I wouldn't mind the difference, maybe some minor tricks here and there.
You can get burned with MongoDB (totally inconsistent data model? Well, that sucks bad), you can get burned with PostgreSQL or other SQL databases (thousand line long business critical stored procedures starts getting inefficient? Self join time explodes after some time in production? Ouch...)
The main point I wanted to make is what jeff-davis (your sibling) summarized for me with words way better than my own: "If you are building something and excited, then keep going, don't stop because a blog told you 'never'"
Too often I read blog posts like the one we are commenting when I was starting with software development as a job, they scared the shit out of me! I didn't have any experience on the tools so reading that some much more experienced guy working on some Silicon Valley billion dollar corporation was saying "This is shit: you touch it, you die" didn't bring anything useful to me, just stress...
Over the years I've heard everything and its contrary about... anything! There is normal people here on HN, there are young devs starting right now that read those comments, not everyone is building mission critical rocket firmware, billion users social networks or AI/ML/Blockchain fanta-finance trading bots (not that you are implying anything like that, far from it) but my advice after some years in the business is what I wrote: know your tools, get to like them, get proficient, use them well and try to build something good... your personal experience, be it success or failure, is worth a thousand times more than the success or failure narrated on a random guy/girl blog from N years ago
This is a weird perspective. Most of us work for money and other people are calling the shots on what's in priority to develop right now. Your statement reads like you're commenting about hobby projects?
> Too often I read blog posts like the one we are commenting when I was starting with software development as a job, they scared the shit out of me!
Not to be reductionist, just trying to understand: your point of view boils down to "I skipped a good tool because I bought a fear-mongering tech blog article", is that correct?
If so, obviously one has to form their own opinions as they gain experience. But I wouldn't feel that strongly about those articles. My takeaways are: (a) critical thinking is important and (b) you can't ban people from posting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> I didn't have any experience on the tools so reading that some much more experienced guy working on some Silicon Valley billion dollar corporation was saying "This is shit: you touch it, you die" didn't bring anything useful to me, just stress...
Not sure what point you're making here. Our job is riddled with stress in general (even if you only take this as an entry point: the brain hates learning and wants us to stay still by default). Confronting that reality means exiting software development for many.
> your personal experience, be it success or failure, is worth a thousand times more than the success or failure narrated on a random guy/girl blog from N years ago
That is absolutely true. But we should recognize filter bubbles regardless. I for example only heard one successful MongoDB story and the team switched to another DB 3 years later.
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If your general takeaway is: "use whatever you want" then sure, nobody can dispute that since we live in a free world. However:
(a) When comparing tools for certain jobs, there are objectively worse tools compared to others. This reality should not be avoided, or denied, or brushed aside with generic statements.
(b) "Just use whatever you like" is not a sound career advice. Some tools will give you better career opportunities, others will make people frown at you for being the bleeding edge adopter but can give you a competitive advantage, and some will just burn you.
It's not about if you can achieve X with any technology. For the most part, you can do pretty much anything with everything. Still doesn't make it viable or the solution with the least friction and most reward though.
I felt your comments were too generic, too optimistic, and rather uninformative. Hence my responses.
- here almost every single company is incredibly small (average is 4 employees)
- we have lots of companies (66 every 1000 adult citizen)
- IT panorama here is like 15 years behind the US
- after university or technical school you know almost nothing, just some basic abstract notions
So you have to learn every single thing by yourself, and if you want to work with today technology you will not learn it at $WORKPLACE because your boss probably is a 60 years old guy who wrote COBOL programs but want you to build "something like Facebook in the next two weeks".
The only window we have on today technology is on the internet, many tools that come cheap somewhere else are quite expensive for us and you must be lucky to know that one guy that can give you some hints.
In my case I've studied in technical school and then did IT engineering at the local university, which I dropped with a couple of exams to go after I had to argue with a professor that solved it's own exercise in a broken way and couldn't understand why my solution worked. In the last 15 years working, until now, I didn't know anyone here in my hometown who can work with anything outside some legacy ASP stuff, basic PHP on CMSs like Wordpress or some basic Java applications (mostly Android), DBs are always MySQL. Just a friend of mine who uses QT, which he learnt by himself and after changing three jobs now he is finally in a dev team, but on the previous three he was the only dev in the company. (I know other people that work with "today's" tech but they are not from my province)
I don't know if I can communicate my point, but reading that $PERSON who works at $COMPANY says that $PRODUCT is shit because he had problems scaling to 100mln users is a totally useless point for all the people outside the few tech bubbles around the world.
It's not about "everything is good", I never said that everything is good, but in the real world™ people built great things using almost any tech, maybe even "uncool" tech: it worked, they made money, they were successful, their company served customers for years and years, and maybe the chosen tech had a positive role in the process. My point is about people that say "Never", "Always", "This is broken", "You'll get burned", "It doesn't work"... that's the part that is not constructive: it didn't work for you, for your case, maybe you did some mistakes, but $PERSON must stick to his/her own reality, not try to extend their experience to everyone else.
Can relate to this a lot and I agree. US / Silicon Valley tech blog articles aren't always informative and one has to apply a lot of critical thinking if they want to extract any value from them. I am with you here.
> It's not about "everything is good", I never said that everything is good, but in the real world™ people built great things using almost any tech, maybe even "uncool" tech: it worked, they made money, they were successful, their company served customers for years and years
I would immediately agree with you if the result-oriented people actually made good money [almost] always regardless of technology. But it isn't universally the case, so very often you have programmers who know modern (and very good) tools but are required to use ancient ones because "they just work".
Truth is that no, very often they don't just work; they "just work" due to the suffering of countless underpaid programmers who can't say "no" because they are afraid for their family's livelihoods. Let's not conflate concepts. ;)
I've seen people replace legacy PHP + MySQL + ssh/rsync scripts for deployment with a managed service like Heroku (or Docker/k8s, or bare metal on two instances) and a more modern programming language -- hosting bills dropped by anywhere from 50% to 800% and like 3/4 of the IT personnel became superfluous (and were fired in a few months). There is a lot of efficiency that's routinely left on the table and is never reached for.
It's a nuanced discussion. Generalizations like yours and like mine can't nail it. I am 100% with you that not everything has to be "new" and "cool": absolutely! But this same argument is also used to drag down or even stop measurable progress, productivity gains and expense savings.
There's a balance to be struck and both programmers and businessmen have too extreme points of view -- on the both sides of the spectrum -- and don't achieve it.
> "Never", "Always", "This is broken", "You'll get burned", "It doesn't work"... that's the part that is not constructive: it didn't work for you, for your case, maybe you did some mistakes, but $PERSON must stick to his/her own reality, not try to extend their experience to everyone else.
Agreed in principle, but not in your particular example. MongoDB is supposed to actually store data. For several years in a row it was failing even in that. You can't claim you are a database and lose people's data. So I definitely would side with that author's viewpoint that "MongoDB sucks" because yes, it does, or at least it did for years in the past and nowadays I am too burned by it to try it out again.
> I don't know where you're from, I'm from Italy so let me put down some points:
RE: the tech landscape of the local market, I am from (and in) Bulgaria and it's almost the same here. I was getting Ruby on Rails offers in 2020 and it was touted as a "bleeding edge modern technology". Those recruiters gave me good chuckles.
In the meantime I am working with Elixir for 4.5 years and Rust for 2.5 years now...
It should be noted that VCs also burnt a lot of marketing money to deliberately create that blind enthusiasm and optimism.
Certainly I could endeavor to build amazing modern software in C, but unless for some reason C is an absolute must, I would rather try any other language first. I doubt this is a controversial statement, and yet someone will always be there to defend the opposite stance.
What does 'good' mean? Gcc is a good C compiler and a bad Java compiler. It's even worse at being a document database.
I don't think 01acheru was saying that all tools are equally able to do all tasks. I read them as saying that people have used tools with recognized flaws to make good stuff and that being snobby about whether tools are "good" or "bad" in a general way isn't super useful for anyone. Instead, we should say specific things about specific flaws and let others decide if those flaws matter to them.
In particular, this post isn't really saying that MongoDB doesn't work, it's saying that the MongoDB data model isn't useful for what the author was using it for. Even if you are sure that your app was "the perfect use case for MongoDB" all you can really speak about is your use case. The real headline for this article is "we couldn't make MongoDB work and we're skeptical anyone can," which is totally fair, but shys away from the grand claims that 01acheru (and I) are critiquing.
> No database makes you more productive
> The most popular database for modern apps
What we have here is not really something intended for a specialist usecase, as implied by your comment. Mongo is clearly pushed as being the best database, used by most "modern" apps.
For me, they appear to claim to be popular and focused on developer productivity. Those quotes don't seem to show them claiming to be "the best". Like...it's pretty standard "put your best foot forward" sort of high level description and I think it's a bit much to say that they're making some universal claim?
> Gcc is a good C compiler and a bad Java compiler
Meaning, some tools are meant for a specific purpose and it's not fair to judge them if they do poorly at things they were not designed to do. GCC does not claim to be a java compiler (any longer [1]).
I don't think this apology applies to MongoDB. It is described as a "general purpose" database, good for most modern apps. This is asserting exactly the opposite of what was argued in the parent comment. It is then fair to expect that it should do a good job of representing basic data like graph relationships.
Once we start talking about C compilers (or general databases), I wanted to express the idea that terms like 'good' or 'bad' are too board to be useful. The only way MongoDB would be a 'bad' database is if it didn't do what it said it did (which seemed to be true for a long time[2]). 'Bad' only makes sense, to me, as a synonym for 'broken.'
Instead, tools that perform the game general function tend to focus on different aspects of that function. MongoDB focuses on 'productivity' (whatever that means). My impression was, for a time, GCC focused on overall performance while Clang focused on IR introspection through LLVM[3].
I think the article OP links is valid criticism of MongoDB. They're very clear that Mongo didn't work for their use case and I'm sure they're correct. I just think they go too far in saying "Never use MongoDB" and that what they're really saying is something along the lines of, "we couldn't make MongoDB work and we're skeptical anyone can."
P.s. I don't think GCC ever claimed to be a Java compiler - your link is to GCJ, a different program also made by GNU.
[1] Such as SDCC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Device_C_Compiler
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10560834/to-what-extent-...
[3] I don't think this is true anymore? I don't write a lot of C.
I got more of a "stop complaining about tools. Pick one you like, use it and build something with IT instead. I feel the same way. Developers are a fickle bunch. One tool works, but then in order to be "cool" you have to bag on it and then propose some other obscure tool you think is better that nobody has ever heard of.
It seriously reminds me of people arguing over music. Its totally uncool to like a mainstream band because everybody else likes that band and its not cool to like them. So then you have all the "cool" people who listen to all the obscure "awesome" bands who Rolling Stone magazine tells you to listen to, so then you go around telling people you listen to the Shithouse Rats. "Oh you've never heard of the Shithouse Rats? Well, they're kind of obscure." and now you're one of the of the cool kids.
And by the way I really like you music analogy, and it’s emblematic of something even larger: they read about Shithouse Rats on Rolling Stone, named after a song of Bob Dylan or Muddy Waters or the group itself (don’t know which one) and all of them are quite famous and mainstream.
You’ve got to love mankind, we are awesome!
Hard to get using it approved at work, less usage means fewer bugs are caught and features developed, etc.
So people evangelize their favorite tools because it benefits them directly to have them adopted more widely.
Think of it like horse drawn wagon vs. a car. There might exist a guy who in his humble opinion thinks the wagon is better so he use it to get places instead of a car but is that guy a reasonable guy? No.
The analogy I mentioned above is more apt because Mongo was indeed at one point in time more of a wagon rather than an unpopular piece of music.
And it's a bit insensitive to suggest that you support incest and child rape. Or am I reading to much into your post?
Let's be honest here. You aren't suggesting that you support raping children anymore then I am suggesting the Amish are unreasonable.
This cancel culture attitude of constantly calling out and classifying everything as some sort of infraction against a culture or a race has got to stop.
I agree. Unfortunately, sarcasm doesn't convey well in text.
But every once in a while you have a case like WhatsApp, which sold to Facebook at a price of $500 million per engineer, which never could have happened without Erlang.
I concur. Version 3.0 is dated March 3, 2015 that uses the WiredTiger engine which fixes much of the brokenness.
I did some workaround work on a MongoDB v2.x app. It did suck and was inconvenient operationally, but it also did scale so had its uses.
However the discussion now should be about how it is to be used/not today and not back in 2013. So fair to say it did suck or you shouldn't have used it, but that doesn't have much relevance.
Don't those tools die out and get forgotten?
There is no correlation between something being widely used and it being good at its job.