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Comment by vegai | Hacker News Reader

One of the lessons: Do not use Java for production applications.

I don't think that's fair. GMail and Adwords are production applications and do just fine with Java.

I think it's more the opposite: Do not use Java when you haven't achieved product/market fit yet. Because it will cost you, dearly, in iteration velocity. Go write your initial version in Python or Ruby or Lisp or something that lets you quickly try out new ideas, and once it starts creaking under load, then you rewrite it in Java or C++.

Or write your initial version in Go, and you wont have to do a rewrite ;)

But you'll have a tough time finding libraries when you want to prototype your new feature really quick... ;-)

The Go stdlib is rather comprehensive. And there are tons of third party libs:

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/pure-go-libs http://go-lang.cat-v.org/library-bindings

Do not use Java for production applications if you don't know how to use Java.

You're implying that Wave engineers don't know how to use Java. But Wave engineers are Google engineers. Google engineers are hired somewhere in a high 90th percentile of programming ability and experience.

You've proven the GP's point -- don't use Java because the only people who know how to "use it" are 1% of programming experts that you probably don't have working for you.

Only in the bubble of language fashion that is Hacker News, could the failure of Google Wave be attributed to their language choice.

Billions of successful projects run on Java.

>Billions of successful projects run on Java.

I will give you billion dollars if you can prove that.

My personal guess (using my personal metrics) is that there are 10^3 to 10^4 successful Java projects and 10^9 failed ones.

In any event, the failed ones don't mean anything useful.

Successful ones mean "You can succeed using this". The failed ones mean "This failed, could have been for a ton of reasons".

amazon.com runs java since day 1, fairly successful too :-)

Weren't they on Perl and Masonry in the beginning?

> You're implying that Wave engineers don't know how to use Java. But Wave engineers are Google engineers. Google engineers are hired somewhere in a high 90th percentile of programming ability and experience.

I'll just leave this here (Dart - the new language from Google). http://webreflection.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-is-wrong-abou...

I think you're a little too trusting that every single Google programmer knows what they're doing.

According to comment in this same thread by a member of the Wave team, the problem is that they used Java the way it is supposed to be used, and that is why they ended up with over a million lines of idiomatic Java code when the same project would have been under a hundred thousands if written in another language.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102493

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