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Comment by chairhairair | Hacker News Reader

Is there more info about the tool itself that claims 100X decrease in application development cost? Quite the claim.

I'm also curious. It seems like the website has been around for 2 years and hasn't changed much. If they wrote 250k lines in two years, that is around 340 lines a day. That seems like a rather large project to build before putting it in the hands of customers.

It does seem odd. Stealth product. Bold claims. 3 blog posts one of which is a funding announcement and the other two having nothing to do with the product. I am intrigued but also a bit skeptical.

Nathan Marz was the original creator of what became Apache Storm [1], which powered Twitter for some time. Skepticism is healthy, perhaps even warranted here, but I'm not betting against him just yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Storm

He is also the creator of Cascalog (Hadoop query dsl in Clojure) and the Lambda architecture pattern.

Not lambda as we know it now popularised by AWS, but an architecture for stream processing where batch views from expensive and slow batch jobs are combined with speed views from stream processors into the final live result.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_architecture

100x increase in productivity is a silly, hyperbolic claim no matter who makes it. I'd even be skeptical of a 2x claim, because in 25 years I have yet to see any of these productivity plays actually pan out. What I have seen are small incremental improvements here and there, but you can't point to anything in the recent past that has improved productivity 10x or 100x (unless your old process was just total crap).

At best I would expect a small niche collection of very specific tasks to be improved, but definitely not applicable to general productivity.

you concluded something is impossible based on the fact that you have never seen it before? talking about silly claims :)

Yes, that's how observation and personal opinion works.

well it should not be how personal opinions are formed - maybe you should look up first principle thinking if you have not yet. I do not know if their 100X claim will come true or not, however saying something is impossible merely because it has not been done in the past is clearly wrong

> saying something is impossible

Point out where I said "impossible"? I said skeptical, which is an absolutely perfectly position to take. I'm all perfectly happy to be wrong.

“Powered Twitter” is an overstatement. Storm was indeed used at Twitter for select streaming use cases, but it was a bit of a mess and ended up being rewritten from the ground up for 10x improvements in latency and throughout [1]. Marz was at the company for < 2 years. Lately, Twitter has been moving data processing use cases to GCP [2].

Storm is also not very well regarded in the stream processing community due to its restrictive model, poor guarantees, and abysmal performance [3].

I have nothing against Marz, but I do think skepticism is warranted until we see what they’ve built.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2015/flying-fas... [2] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... [3] I worked at Twitter for 3 years, then at Google on Millwheel and Streaming Dataflow.

if the cost of building a large scale, end to end application used to be:

$10M, the new cost will be $100k, or $10k, or less.

$1M, the new cost will be $10k, or $1k, or less.

It's still in stealth mode. They raised $5M in 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19565267

how exactly is it stealth if they have a blog and announced funding?

I meant that they didn't reveal the product yet.

I've heard from investors that it is similar to Darklang. It certainly has the same goals, but dunno if it's the same approach in any way. Will be interesting to see

In that case, I wouldn't go near it with a ten foot pole.

what? nothing's perfect, but i thought darklang was kinda cool to the extent i messed around with it. i even did a couple toy "useful" things with it and found it pretty fun.

I will be very dubious of this claim, or belief is really what it is. There is not even simplistic metrics to back it up

The team is impressive, I was wondering what all this new internal language, 400 macros, etc., could be put towards, thinking they were stuck in over-engineering. But after seeing that promise for their app, I changed my mind. Something that’s capable of making you 100 times more productive probably does need that level of development.

I don't know even still if efficiency is correlated to lines of code in a product. Sure maybe a weak relationship at best, but the scale of the software does not necessarily mean it will be any more useful than something else.

I don't think twobitshifter's point was that "more code === better product" either but rather that if it's a product with big scope, it probably has more code in it than if it was a product with narrow scope.

I know Clojure well enough to call BS on that claim. Unless you compare what they do with the worst possible incompetent alternative.

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